Best OS For Netbooks and Underpowered Tablets?

vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by managing to give me a better battery life. I've been happy using XP Tablet on this machine until recently, when I started thinking that by optimizing the OS for targeted use, I may be able to squeeze more out of the device. So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop? Usage is typically light — web surfing (with multimedia), email, word processing, spreadsheet and reading PDFs. Also, what OS would you recommend for a ultraportable tablet? Usage is similar to a netbook; there's a little more document editing going on, and good handwriting recognition and note-taking software would be great." Read on for further details about vigmeister's question. vigmeister continues, "I would like for the user experience to be snappy on a computer that is essentially running the equivalent of a 1.2 GHz PIII with 512mb RAM. The other objective for both of these is to maximize the battery life, as that is the major drawback of these ultraportables. A small memory footprint would work wonders, since the hard drives on these devices are typically slow and completely suck the joy out of using them when swap space is being used. Any tips? If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."

Comments

Something *nix, for sure

[ohxten]

Try a *nix -- maybe something like FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[try_anything]

Something *nix, for sure

Because the sheer idea of Unix inspires a computer torun more efficiently? I kid, mostly.

A couple years ago I was thinking along the same lines as vigmeister (i.e., getting a Fujitsu tablet for light usage around the house, maybe play go online on the couch.) Reports around the internet were that XP Tablet (or is it just Windows Tablet?) was a dog on old Fujitsus. Windows 2000 was more popular, and some people were even recommending using Windows 95, which required finding Windows tablet functionality that had been backported to 95.

At the time, it sounded like a bit of a project to get Linux working on a Fujitsu tablet. I wonder if anything has changed since then?

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[Tubal-Cain]

Apparently, you meant to say "say".

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[hairyfeet]

I would vote for Win2K Pro. I am running it on a desktop with almost the same specs and even with many programs running in the background it is still very snappy. And if you further tweak it by going to a site like Blackvipers services list and turning off anything you don't need it can be very conservative on RAM and CPU cycles.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[GrpA]

Or forget *nix and just stay with windows, or maybe even Vista... The P1510 might be 3 years old, but it's hardly underpowered...

The 1.2 Pentium M isn't a P3 at 1.2Ghz.. Its the equivalent of a p4 at 1.8 Ghz...

I've played Tron 2.0 at 1280x1024 quite smoothly on it, so don't let the fact it doesn't support new shader models hide the fact it has some seriously beefed up graphics with the 915 GMS chipset fall to the side either. Pretty good for what was around 3 years ago in any laptop and more than most compact models still can do.

It's not a Quad core, or even a duo, but it's hardly underpowered even by today's standards.

Try comparing it to other recent palmtop models... It pretty much leaves them for dead, even as a 3 year veteran...

Just get some more memory and quit whining. Its cheap enough, even if proprietary.

Anyway, that's what I'm sending you this response from, from a train, on mobile internet... on a P1510...

GrpA

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[mrchaotica]

Windows 2000 was more popular, and some people were even recommending using Windows 95, which required finding Windows tablet functionality that had been backported to 95.

Do you have a link to this Win2K tablet functionality backport?

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[hmar]

The problem there being handwriting recognition. I tried Ubuntu on a Fujitsu C-500 Tablet, and I could not find any decent handwriting software. Everything was still in the "graffiti" stage. Now I have Win 2K on the tablet, which is slightly less resource heavy than XP.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[try_anything]

Sorry, no. It sounded like a lot of work (even more than installing Linux) so I didn't try it.

However, last time I looked (a couple of years ago) there were Fujitsu tablets for sale on Ebay with Windows 95 installed. You might find someone there who can help you.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[skeeto]

Exactly this would be my suggestion. I have found that computers from about 2000 or older are completely unable to run, say Ubuntu, in any usable fashion, even with a switch to XFCE from Gnome. I have put OpenBSD on these kinds machines and, excepting memory hogs like Firefox, they are really speedy.

However, the OPs laptop isn't really that old (4 or 5 years I would guess). 512MB of memory is enough for Ubuntu. Anything with at least 256MB of memory will do fine, however you can't run some really heavy applications like Eclipse or Azureus (and in some cases OpenOffice) with less than 512MB.

Re:Something *nix, for sure

[mrchaotica]

Ah, those Fujitsus probably used some non-standard handwriting stuff then -- and the handwriting recognition is one of the few things that Microsoft actually did right (along with its input devices and C# (but not .NET)).

It wasn't an issue of trying to find an old tablet, by the way; I already have an X60 Tablet. I just prefer Win2K over WinXP for ethical reasons (no Activation -- regardless of the fact that my copies of XP Tablet Edition and Vista Business came with the machine, and are thus legal).

I guess I'll just investigate slimming down XP (and maybe backporting Vista's handwrting recognition -- it really is better, but not enough for the rest of the OS to be worth it) instead.

Are you kidding?

[HateBreeder]

You're naively asking for an OS recommendation on Slashdot?

talk about predictability of results...

Re:Are you kidding?

[Aminion]

Yeah, all the Windows ME fanboism is getting really old.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Foofoobar]

Just because the engineers response happens to be one that you may disgree with 'religiously' should not impair your ability as an engineer to agree that it makes a better choice for a lowend outdated machine. Attempting to fit a modern, bloated OS with poor security and modern drivers requirements to an outdated machine is not only dumb but childish in assuming that one OS fits all.

Had the option been 'what OS should I use on a modern machine to connect to my other office PC's?' I would probably suggest Windows or Mac unless they happened to BE a developer. But in this case, I would say Linux is the best engineering choice. So get off your high horse and start thinking like an engineer.

Re:Are you kidding?

[MimsyBoro]

Yeah, The question should be something like "Which flavour of Ubuntu would you recommend?" And maybe you'll get one "no but Fedora is also cool" but don't count on it.

Re:Are you kidding?

[HardCase]

Now, the really funny thing is that all the [insert linux distro here] recommendations are going to ignore one of his requests: maximize battery life. Unfortunately, that's one thing that no Linux...excuse me, GNU/Linux, distro has managed to achieve. We're still trying to hit the Linux on the Desktop benchmark.

Re:Are you kidding?

[pablomme]

Let me introduce you to PowerTOP. Come back after you try it.

Re:Are you kidding?

[poetmatt]

If you think that anything other than linux is the most power efficient, I'd like to not only point you to the responses below but also let you know that you have it pretty much backwards. Linux distros can not only be more efficient but can even be specifically aimed to be even moreso on top of that. PowerTOP was my first thought, as well.

I mean what do you want to point people to? OSX? Vista? Lets be honest now. Try not to throw chairs next time.

Re:Are you kidding?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

Serious response here: I gave up on windows ME/2000 and switched to windows flp. gotta pirate it, but it works wonders! (of course, nlite works wonders too)...

Re:Are you kidding?

[RiotingPacifist]

linux is not great though, even after taking the suggestions from powertop (i believe they are implemented in "laptop-mode" for ubuntu but dont sue me if im wrong), it marginally outperforms windows machines, but still lakes acpi support to make suspend useable (depends on machine ofc). Using a touchpad in xorg also seams to kill battery life.

However what is great is the amount of user interaction with the powersaving, if you use something like kpowersave you just scroll over the icon to change your brightness (which cuts power consumption to nearly half on my laptop), there is also compression on hibernate, which means that you can get back to full desktop much faster than a normal hibernate/boot. In adition using powertop lets you audit your system to see whats wasting your batteries when idle (kicker in KDE is a common suspect, so switching to fluxbox can also give a marginal (5-10 mins) battery life increase)

My point: Linux is no better (and often worse) by default, but if you tweak it you CAN outperfom windows and gain other benifits too (no need for AV, faster boot, faster hibernate, faster file access and chkdsk (reiserfs mainly but ext3 is good too))

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You're naively asking for an OS recommendation on Slashdot? talk about predictability of results..." - by HateBreeder (656491) on Sunday October 26, @11:50AM (#25517843)

Right as rain: Because here? This site's a DEFINITE "Pro-*NIX" slanted one generally, in most of its posters... so, you're going to get a LARGE suggestion base for Linux, MacOS X, & maybe a BSD variants besides OSX...

Ah, anyhow (you're right by the by, & I *think* you were leaning towards my conclusion above, lol):

----

HOWEVER, to satisfy the original poster's requests/constraints of:

"I would like for the user experience to be snappy on a computer that is essentially running the equivalent of a 1.2 GHz PIII with 512mb RAM. The other objective for both of these is to maximize the battery life, as that is the major drawback of these ultraportables. A small memory footprint would work wonders, since the hard drives on these devices are typically slow and completely suck the joy out of using them when swap space is being used. Any tips? If you are still using your outdated laptops/tablets productively, please share with us how you're doing it, so we can too."

----

Thus, based SOLELY on that criteria? I'd have to say, @ least out of the MODERN Windows NT-based family?? Windows 2000... especially once it is FULLY SP#4 (current one for it) applied + hotfix patched to current ones & beyond.

E.G.-> I've seen Windows 2000 running recently QUITE WELL (after trimming services & other background startup programs) on a CELERON 450mhz desktop machine no less! This is for a year straight on my best pal's machine (he doesn't make a lot of money, & we threw it together for he on pretty much this basis no less, the criteria listed above).

( &, if that is NOT light & fast on a DEFINITELY "low-end machine" by comparison to today's systems, & even the OP's criteria above? Then, I don't know what is)...

Windows 2000's also got decent power management as well, & its smaller/lighter on resource consumption than XP or Server 2003 are (& definitely moreso than VISTA) also, especially once you "tune/tweak" it, & there is a wealth of guides out there for that online, bigtime, PLUS it's very simple/easy to do? It flies.

APK

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you really wanted to talk about how it is being an "engineer"...

but,
what does your post have to do with the grandparent post?

nothing...

Re:Are you kidding?

[arth1]

This isn't always the case, alas.
For example, with AMD-4 CPUs, you can't use the on-demand cpufreq scheduler because these CPUs don't switch fast enough, and the conservative scheduler has been broken for powernow-k7 since kernel 2.6.24, with no fix in sight. So you end up running the CPU either at full speed all the time, or once it drops down to the lowest speed it will never increase again.
With Windows, there's no such problems -- the AMD PowerNow drivers keep working pretty stable.

Then there's the nightmare of suspend/hibernate under Linux. When it works, it's swell, but if you have older hardware (like in TFA), it's more likely than not that it will NOT work.
I have a Presiaro 2100, which goes into standby just fine, it's just the tiny little problem that the ACPI support in the BIOS is broken and no keys can bring it out of standby... I've spent weeks doing kernel rebuilds with various options enabled/disabled, booting with and without options like nolapic, acpi, apm and messing with dbus and acpid, but to no avail.
With Windows, there's no problems at all.

So I'd say it depends a lot on your specific hardware. When Linux works well, it works better than Windows, but don't expect things to work, either out of the box or at all. Give it a shot, but if it doesn't work, chances are that Windows will work -- after all, that's almost guaranteed what the notebook was delivered with.

Re:Are you kidding?

[try_anything]

Actually, the question should be, "Which desktop environment, and which applications?" The desktop environment and applications will eat more resources and have a much bigger impact on performance than the OS.

For Windows, the desktop environment and the OS are pretty thoroughly linked. With Linux, on the other hand, even if you limit yourself to a single major distro such as Ubuntu or Fedora, you can run any desktop environment you like. Lately I've been trying to get acquainted with Fluxbox, which runs just fine (and fast) on my Kubuntu box.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Blakey Rat]

Well, handwriting recognition sucks on Linux. So the "obvious" Slashdot choice is no good to answer the question. Frankly, I think his XP Tablet is the best choice, unless Vista happens to run well (I doubt it will, but Vista has much better handwriting recognition.)

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, so I'm looking at the powertop screenshot on its homepage. It's a terminal program for seeing which processes are causing wakeups. And the top four power-hungry processes it shows are my wireless driver, Firefox, Evolution and X! Are you seriously telling me to shut down one of these four things, when the whole point of buying a netbook was to get email and internet on the go? What use is this to me?

Oh, apart from that it suggests that I turn off bluetooth. Brilliant, not like every other OS says the same thing. And I like how I have to type in two terminal commands and remove a kernel module to do it, whereas on Windows you just rightclick the bluetooth icon in the tray and hit disable.

Powertop is top is nice, but it's a diagnostic tool. It's incredibly naive to suppose that Microsoft, Apple, etc don't have their own. It's also mostly useless to any user who is not a software professional.

Re:Are you kidding?

[level_headed_midwest]

Handwriting recognition in Linux can be quite decent. CellWriter (http://risujin.org/cellwriter/) is one of the better handwriting-recognition tools for *nix and it is what I use on my Gateway S-7125C tablet. It's a little better than the handwriting recognition in XP Tablet 2005 but worse than Vista's. XP Tablet will run fine on a 1.2 GHz CPU but might balk a bit at 512 MB RAM, particularly if the OP wants to use MS Office 2003 or 2007, which are far from lightweight apps. Windows Vista certainly does have excellent tablet integration, but it's just going to take one look at a machine with 512 MB RAM and laugh. That pretty much leaves Linux and Linux would run reasonably nicely on a 1.2 GHz machine with 512 MB RAM. I had Debian Lenny running on a Celeron 900 with 256 MB RAM up until just a few weeks ago and it ran pretty well for being 8-year-old hardware.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Z34107]

I have an Acer Aspire One netbook. It has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor (with hyperthreading, evidently), 1.5GB of RAM (I upgraded it from 512MB), an 8GB SSD drive, and a 1024x600 screen.

It came with "Linpus" (a horrid distro of Linux), which inspired me to try to install a different operating system. (It performed OK, but they did their best to hide any advanced functionality like, you know, installing a program. No package manager for you!).

If you're a college student, Google "Microsoft DreamSpark." Ballmer is giving out free, full licenses to Windows Server 2003 and 2008, amongst other things, presumably to brainwash the latest generation of human capital. So, I installed Server 2003 Standard on my tiny little netbook and got some Enhanced Write Filter drivers from an XP Embedded ISO. It runs amazingly fast (EWF drivers are similar to what Live CDs use - writes are committed to memory instead of disk, which makes fetching those files later extremely fast), and can even play World of Warcraft.

So, what I suggest you do is figure out how to get Enhanced Write Filter drivers working on your machine. Prior to installing them on my machine, Firefox was almost unusable - scrolling down one line would cause a torrent of disk activity, which would lock the machine until it was finished. (Windows really isn't meant for solid state drives, it seems.) After installing those drivers, it boots faster than my gaming rig, and is hyper-responsive.

Since Tablet XP seems to have the proper handwriting support you want, try installing those drivers. It made my Server 2003 install perform leaps and bounds better; I'm sure it'll help XP Tablet, too.

Re:Are you kidding?

[ksd1337]

DOS? *ducks*

Re:Are you kidding?

[maxume]

What if he is a janitor?

Re:Are you kidding?

[mweather]

You can lower power use by shutting off things that aren't at the top of the list, too.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Brandano]

Actually, i still have an old PC with a Pentium II MMX and Windows 95 on it, and it's the 2nd fastest booting PC I got, after my Athlon 64 with Ubuntu. On the other hand I think that any flavor of Linux is more likely to have up-to-date drivers, especially for a tablet PC, than Win95

Re:Are you kidding?

[Gorgonzolanoid]

And you can connect such a Linux PC to the internet and still sleep at night :) Win95 isn't too bad for a standalone PC, but I'd prefer NT or W2000 there.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Fri13]

The monolith kernel is the OS. Microkernel tries to make more stable OS by moving as much OS parts to userland as possible.

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2006-04/openpdfs/herder.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0130313580/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-7158569-1619062#reader-link

Monolith kernel is the old way building a OS. Microkernel is the "new" way for building a OS.

But you might be those who believe that OS is that what has desktop, icons, wallpapers etc. And openoffice, Firefox and Gimp are parts of OS?

Re:Are you kidding?

[i.of.the.storm]

Ah, WinFLP=Windows for Legacy PCs. For those too lazy to google it themselves.

Re:Are you kidding?

[i.of.the.storm]

Argh, I mean Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs.

Re:Are you kidding?

[i.of.the.storm]

I experienced the same thing, although a little bit better in my case. Sometimes in Linux my newer (~5 months old) laptop decides to turn off the screen or something, but no amount of coaxing would get it to wake back up, except ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X.

Re:Are you kidding?

[calmofthestorm]

Really? I prefer linux myself, but ME definitely holds the edge for stability, security, and user experience.

If I were a power user I'd consider upgrading my linux to genuine windows, but us casual users can get by with a lighter experience.

Re:Are you kidding?

[aliquis]

Could you explain the EWF-stuff a little? What it does, how it helped and some kind of step by step guide on how you got and installed it? Never heard of it before.

Re:Are you kidding?

[turgid]

What if he is a janitor?

Is he mild-mannered?

Re:Are you kidding?

[sacker12345]

And if you read the Tips and Tricks. It had patches for each of the items you listed. To run more effective. As in Evolution has a 10hz timer that checks for events in a queue, even if there isn't any. They created a patch for it to only run if there is something in the queue. Firefox was something similar and X usually is doing the bidding of another program.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Foofoobar]

Well then his blackberry ought to do.

Re:Are you kidding?

[spazdor]

*whoosh*

Re:Are you kidding?

[flosofl]

Did you try following the link that helpfully included in the post? It looks like it has all the info you require.

EWF Overview
Provides an overview of Enhanced Write Filter. This overview describes the EWF architecture and the components that are required to support EWF. It also defines common EWF terminology.

EWF Modes
Describes the different modes of EWF, and how to implement each type.

EWF Design Considerations
Describes the considerations you should make before configuring and deploying an EWF-protected run-time image./blockquote

Re:Are you kidding?

[aliquis]

Yeah I followed it and saw that it seemed to be for whole discs and then I followed rule of TL:DR.

I got the impression it limited writes on a disk, and I couldn't see the purpose for that.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Count Fenring]

Monolithic, not all monolithic kernels are older than all microkernels, and, well, the boundaries of what OS means are fuzzy, but most people put them well outside of the kernel. Personally, I'd probably consider at least everything above the "resident in motherboard" level that's needed to boot the kernel into a state where you can run userspace programs on it. Again, this may not be your definition, but I think it's closer to the consensus definition than "The Kernel is the OS."

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiosity, how does the internets run on Windows 95 computers? Do you find you run into a lot of sites that don't display or function correctly? What browser/browsers do you use? (posting anonymously due to mod points)

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

And now the severe beating of a high school janitor....

Mop Mop Mop, All Day Long, Mop Mop Mop While I Sing This Song. I'm going to wax that floor, im gonna make it shine, gonna take off the spray paint with turpentine.
(steps coming)
Hey! Don't Walk There! I Just Mopped!

CLUNK! Hey!
That's my bucket!
ARRR! let go of my sideburns!

Re:Are you kidding?

[Z34107]

Sure, I can try explaining a little bit. And those "RTFA" posts are definitely not helpful; it was a pain for me (in my infinite wisdom, of course) to get EWF installed and working correctly, and I had step-by-step instructions.

These are from the Aspire One User forums, but these instructions work for most any Windows computer. The short of it is to get EWF drivers, you have to download an XP Embedded ISO image from Microsoft and rip apart an installer. Installing the drivers requires installing some very specific registry keys and running a command-line instruction from the CD you downloaded. After a reboot, you're running with EWF.

What EWF does exactly is it makes a specific drive, say C, "read-only." Any writes to your C drive with EWF enabled (in RAM-Reg mode, or whatever it's called) are trapped in memory instead. Reads to changed files are read from memory.

So, you have a slowly enlarging cache of changed files; it's pretty much the NTFS journal stored in RAM instead of committed to disk. This means if you save a file to your C drive, it appears to be saved (because Windows is reading that part of the file system from memory) but it's gone when you reboot. (So, have a second "save" partition.) You can enable/disable the Enhanced Write Filter at any time if, say, you need to install a patch or a program.

It's pretty fun; you can delete all of the icons on your desktop and everything you can out of your Windows drive and, because those changes were never committed to disk, only temporarily stored in memory, everything's back as it was when you reboot. It can also be dangerous - don't defrag or chkdsk or anything silly like that with it enabled, because all available memory will fill up and then you'll get "delayed write" errors and Windows will hardlock.

Also, turn off your paging file if you install EWF drivers. There is no point in caching memory to disk if any changes to disk are being cached in memory.

It pretty much freezes your computer eternally in one state - it functions as normal, except changes to a EWF protected drive only appear to be saved. You'd want to do this because, well, everything runs much faster. Take Outlook 2007 - you run it, it loads your PST file and makes changes to it. That PST file is now cached in memory, and any further access to it is memory-fast instead of disk-fast. Programs load a lot faster, and the machine boots a lot faster. It acts like a much faster laptop than it is because the disk is used only for reads, and never for any subsequent writes.

The reason it's in an XP Embedded CD is because it's designed to let you run Windows off of a CD or a non-writeable flash card. It's also very handy for saving your solid-state drive from burning out because of the million+ writes per second Windows feels compelled to do.

It's a pain to get working, but you'll know it's working when 1) your computer runs faster and 2) any new icons you make on your desktop (assuming you "Froze" your C drive) disappear when you reboot.

Oddly enough, it's kinda like Vista's Super-Fetch.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, the really funny thing is that all the [insert linux distro here] recommendations are going to ignore one of his requests: maximize battery life.

Strange... every time I go into Windows on my laptop, the proc is always churning away at who knows what sort of processes (AV mostly, I presume). My proc barely even makes a noise in linux except for when I start up iceweasel or go to some flash-ridden website.

That is to say that the battery dies a lot faster in windows for me than it does in linux. Power management in linux isnt as bad as it used to be. Might just be my computer...

Re:Are you kidding?

[aliquis]

Ok, so it did really make it read-only. I have a hard time of seeing the purpose then. Sure mostly writes but maybe also some reads of the changed files will get faster from RAM but, uhm, I guess one may at some time keep the changes (even if one could turn it off.)

Do one really want to spend more of the often small amount of ram on the netbook? Though I guess you have installed more than the standard amount.

Guess ENV on Amiga may have worked a little like this, it hold settings for various apps and lived on the harddrive but at boot it was copied to RAM: instead and the new drawer was assigned ENV: instead of the one on the harddrive. So any reads or writes to ENV: and those files would end up on RAM instead off the harddrive (I guess installers which wrote content for it force-wrote them to the destination harddrive instead.)

(Normally you always had the option to store commands, libs, environmental configuration and things like that either in the program dir, in a system wide dir or in this case in ram and it didn't mattered where you had chosen to put them. So I for instance used to move all the libs out to libs: for the system wide dir instead in case whatever application held a newer version which I already had. Sounds kinda like a bad idea today if the APIs had changed but I guess people was more aware of it back then and didn't remove old stuff because I never ran into troubles from it.)

Re:Are you kidding?

[Z34107]

Making the volume read-only does have a lot of disadvantages, but these can be worked around. I made a second "D" partition and moved my profile data there. (Another registry edit and a hardlink.) So, my My Documents data, Firefox profile/downloads, and everything else are permanent.

But, it does have its bonuses - speed and no need for antivirus. (You can download every virus on the internet - the infection will be lost on reboot

RAM usage is actually pretty light - typical use only consumes 32 MB. If it's working properly, the command "ewfmgr c:" will show you how much you're consuming.

With this kind of setup (My Documents moved to a separate partition), you'll never notice anything different. Unless you install a program, patch Windows, or play a game that stores save game data in the C drive, which will necessitate a "ewfmgr c: -commitanddisable -live" to write changes to disk. Memory consumption is surprisingly small (unless you defrag your drive without disabling it and rebooting ^^), and the performance gains are incredible.

I highly recommend it - I set this up for my grandparents' old desktop. They were happy that it magically ran a lot faster, they never noticed anything different (their Outlook .PSTs and My Documents folder were automagically on another partition), and I was happy because it kept grandkids/well-meaning relatives from breaking their machine.

Re:Are you kidding?

[Fri13]

The idea of monolith structured OS is older than microkernel, what is way to build a OS in first place when they came. There is older microkernel based OS's than monmolith, if you calculate by the developing time of OS. But by calculating the OS strucute by the idealogy timeline, the monolith is older.

And it is not *my* idea to call a monolith kernel as OS. I have received this definition in universities (on two countries, in Finland and on Sweden) and so has all my friends on different schools (and countries). It is the technical definition, a scientific one. Not the twisted term by political or marketing people.

And if Linux starts a Init as first userspace program what then starts automatically (as configured in settings) other userspace programs, then a Linux is a OS as in *your* definition too. Monolith kernel = OS.

The microkernel is alone in kernelspace where the OS servers what userland programs needs, are located too on userspace, so the kernel is not alone a OS, but just a part of OS. Microkernel + OS servers = OS.

"In particular, the early designers goal of putting speed above all else led to monolithic designs with the entire operating system running as a single binary program in kernel mode."

"In our view, the only way to improve operating system reliability is to get rid of the model of the operating system as one gigantic program running in kernel mode, with every line of code capable of compromising or bringing down the system. Nearly all the operating system functionality, and especially all the device drivers, have to be moved to user-mode processes,
leaving only a tiny microkernel running in kernel mode."

OS/2 2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 32bit! And I just upgraded to 16MB of RAM and it FLIES! Preemptive multitasking is awesome.

Re:OS/2 2.1

[jadedoto]

But 64K should be enough for anybody... :(

Windows Vista!

[Anonymous Coward]

'nuf said.

I know!

[nxsty]

How about Windows Vista?

:)

Re:I know!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably joking, but Windows Vista actually has the best tablet support of any operating system I use (XP/Vista/OS X/Ubuntu). I think handwriting recognition is one of the few things that Microsoft actually got right.

Re:I know!

[Abreu]

You're probably joking, but Windows Vista actually has the best tablet support of any operating system I use (XP/Vista/OS X/Ubuntu). I think handwriting recognition is one of the few things that Microsoft actually got right.

Why the heck is this (Score:0 Offtopic)?

Handwriting recognition is one of the features requested by the original poster!

Best OS?

[ROMRIX]

Why don't you just say what you mean. 'What flavor of linux?'

Re:Best OS?

[gparent]

Because maybe it's not the best choice?

That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

I run Kubuntu 8.04 on a Compaq Evo N410c, which is a 1.2GHz P-III with 512MB memory. It's just fine.

The full desktop environments are fat, but not slow. The limiting factor for your free Unix is not CPU - a few hundred MHz will do fine - but memory. I also have a P-II 450MHz desktop running FreeBSD with KDE, and it works marvellously because it's got 704MB RAM.

The other thing is screen resolution - but Xandros on the Eee at 800x480 is quite usable. Perhaps play with the Ubuntu Netbook remix.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

Oh, and the critical factor for battery life? Run a recent Linux. And use PowerTop to check what's taking power, and disable it. Linux is getting REALLY GOOD at this stuff. On my Compaq 6710b (Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM) doing lots of browsing in Firefox 3 with hundreds of tabs and almost nothing else, Windows XP runs 2 hours, Kubuntu 7.10 ran 3 hours, Kubuntu 8.04 runs 3.5 to 4 hours. Your mileage may vary, of course - but the most up-to-date Linux kernel is well worth it.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

in reply to both of your comments:

this is why i think vendors need to create a category of lower power computers--not just laptops/subnotebooks/tablets. the average user is not using their desktop PC for CAD work, 3d/graphic design, video editing, or playing the latest FPS. most people simply need a computer that can efficiently surf the web, check their e-mail, do spreadsheets/word processing/presentations, play music, and watch the occasional DVD.

instead of developing more and more bloated software that negate simultaneous increases in hardware processing power/speed, we should be making software more efficient so that casual computing can be done on cheaper and cheaper systems that require less power & energy rather than more.

the average user should be able to accomplish everything they need to do using a 700-800 MHz low-power processor with 256 MB of RAM. they'd not only save on their electric bill, but we'd be creating a more sustainable society. besides, unlike the PC gamer, media/graphic design professional, the casual computer user shouldn't need to upgrade their hardware every single year to keep up with increasing resource intensive software.

using a simple & efficient OS tailored to the casual computing, the average consumer could use a cheaper, less powerful machine that still boots up in seconds. but that would require that PC vendors stop pre-installing their systems with cruftware by their software partners.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Compholio]

he limiting factor for your free Unix is not CPU - a few hundred MHz will do fine - but memory. I also have a P-II 450MHz desktop running FreeBSD with KDE, and it works marvellously because it's got 704MB RAM.

Personally, that's why I'd recommend NOT using KDE or GNOME (and I use these bloated suckers on every box I own). If you're on a limited memory box (like a netbook) then I'd recommend using Xfce. For the Ubuntu fans you can load Xubuntu for the Xfce version.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd favour one of the lighter options like fluxbox. Less stuff to clutter up a small screen, and uses fewer resources.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[cyber-vandal]

Before the destruction of the proprietary home computer market by the PC, software was a lot more efficiently written because the authors couldn't expect people to just upgrade their hardware.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[tyler_larson]

I have two identical laptops, one running windows fill-time and one that runs the latest linux distros. And while my linux machine is indespensible for many types of work, linux support for laptop features is still frustrating. That's not to say that windows is inherently wonderful, but the fact that hardware makers sink almost all their effort into improving the experience under windows really shows.

Id recommend linux if and only if you are willing to put a lot of time and effort into making the user experience fit your expectations.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Asus eeepc 701 g. Running GOS just fine, I tried Win xp but with a 4gb ssd, I ran out of drive space after the first Windoes Update.

GOS gives me about 700mb of free space and that is after I added what personal files I needed. The full 2gb of memory really spices things up.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix I also tried recently, nothing wrong with it and it even gave me an extra 100mb free space so I may switch back.

Xubuntu can stretch the resources even better.

Sylvania's new netbook ships with Ubuntu preinstalled for good reason. The popularity of these ultraportables gives Linux a great shot at mainstream acceptance. This means more commercial software ported to run without an emulator. More hardware drivers offered by the maker of the hardware.

No more people asking me what that sticker of a penguin is for on the lid of the eeepc, but then again I don't mind answering.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

This is where the Ubuntu LiveCD comes in useful. You can see precisely whether or not you do in fact have to put in a lot of time and effort, or if it Just Works. Which it increasingly does these days.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

15 years ago:
I don't see why they can't just make 4mhz computers running DOS with Word Perfect. They'd only need 16k of RAM and a floppy drive, and it'd be perfect for average users. They don't need all the features of Windows 3.1.
15 years from now:
I don't see why they don't just make 3ghz quad core computers running Windows 7, so the average user can use Office 2007. All they would need is the touchscreen, 4gb of RAM and a few hundred gigabytes of hard drive space. Then they wouldn't waste so much power on these neural input devices and face recognition technology.

The point is, computer technology increases, and at the same time, it gets easier and easier to input, extrapolate, and use. If software bloat didn't demand it, we would never be running quad cores, we wouldn't have high def monitors, and AmigaOS and BeOS would be dominating. Thankfully, technology keeps progressing, bringing us to the stated question, which OS will run my fancy touch screen computer with all the luxuries I am used to for the longest time without needing to plug it in? Tell me that is not incredible.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and the critical factor for battery life? Run a recent Linux.

Spell it out clearly for the newbies. Run a recent KERNEL. (that's Linux folks)

one keyword here would be 'tickless'

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

Yuh. Using an up-to-date distro is the thing. I was amazed to get even more battery life out of 8.10 versus 8.04. (I got the numbers mixed up above.)

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

Sorry - 3.5 to 4 hours on 8.10, 3 hours on 8.04.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[FrostDust]

It's kinda rude to expect common users to subsidize the gizomos you need (want?) by expecting them to buy stuff they don't need. A computer from ten years ago could do most of the stuff users of today want their computer to do, like writing documents, email, uploading digital camera pics, browse the web (that's only inhibited nowadays by bloated, flash-heavy websites), listening to music, etc. Their computer didn't suddenly "go stale." While, yes, it is nice that computer hardware has gotten more powerful to support more intensive applications, the parent's point is that we could get the same performance out of the same old hardware through tighter programming, than by using programs that are built with the expectation of "the sky's the limit," and hoping hardware will catch up to it.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[blackest_k]

If you get a limited memory box like a Netbook buy some more ram, it's not expensive and run whatever you like. limited memory on a netbook is 1.5 to 2gb
plenty for Linux, 2000 or XP.

It might drain the battery a little faster but not by a noticeable amount.

Personally I prefer a minimum of 756. 2000 is nice and frugal but XP seems to like 600 MB just to get to the Desktop. (my observation of typical home user systems with nothing turned off and the usual extra's).

Avoid the swap file and you get a usable PC.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

i said create a new category of low-power PCs, not make all computers low-powered.

you think it's the 50-year-old grandmother who uses AOL to check her e-mail and look up cooking recipes that's pushing the limits of computing technology?

and 15 years ago casual computing didn't exist. home PCs were an esoteric gadget for a very small segment of the population. home PCs didn't become popular until Windows 95 came around, and it wasn't until AOL that the internet became popular and made the home PC a standard appliance in every home. it also helped established the boundaries and applications of casual computing as distinct from hobbyist computing.

it's pretty silly to think that simply increasing clock cycles and power consumption is an indication of technological progress. no one is suggesting that people go back to using CRT monitors, ball mouse, wired keyboards, or pentium I processors. but technology should be refined in ways that increase their utility and improve user experience.

building low power systems that can perform casual computing tasks with less load times, heat output, noise, and take up less space would be a step forward. it's just a step forward in a slightly different direction. i mean, would you consider netbooks, smartphones, internet tablets, and other information appliances steps backward in technology just because they're not using the latest quad core CPUs and $1000 video cards?

save your straw man and red herring arguments. if everyone wanted more expensive computers just to run bloated OSes that provided no performance increase then Windows Vista would be flying off the shelves. but that is not progress in most people's eyes. if casual computing evolves to include more processor/resource-intensive applications in the future then of course baseline processor speeds would have to be increased. but right now it's decreasing software efficiency that's driving hardware upgrades in the casual computing market, not more advanced applications such as in the fields of PC gaming/media design/etc.

perhaps you should learn to read more carefully instead making flawed analogies that have nothing to do with the issue. no one is arguing against technological progress or high end systems. but it doesn't take a quad core workstation with 4 GB of RAM to run Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer when these applications are already starting to show up on cellphones and other $200-300 portable devices.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[TrekkieTechie]

They're called 'nettops' -- MSI and Asus both make them, as well as Koolu, CompuLab, and Everex.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[notdotcom.com]

But, running a live CD would kill the battery quite quickly if it has to constantly spin the CD-ROM.

I know that most sub-notebooks don't have integrated optical drives, so perhaps live USB Ubuntu or other linux would be better(?)

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Dutch Gun]

the average user should be able to accomplish everything they need to do using a 700-800 MHz low-power processor with 256 MB of RAM. they'd not only save on their electric bill, but we'd be creating a more sustainable society.

I don't think a separate line of lower-powered desktop machines is all that practical.

First, you can buy a very capable modern computer for under $500 right now. Most of the cost at this point is going to costs that won't be mitigated by creating a lower powered machine (shipping, manufacturing, the monitor and other bulky hardware, etc).

Second, modern machines can go into low-power sleep mode when not being used. Or, you can just turn the thing off when you're not using it.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Airline_Sickness_Bag]

Until a year and a half ago, my computer was a 566Mhz Celeron with 384MB of memory. I ran CentOS 4 (RHEL 4) with KDE. The only problems with it was that over an evening of web surfing, the browser could take 200MB+ of memory, and it was too slow to play DVDs and downloaded videos.

The replacement system is a 2.2GHZ Athalon X2 with 2GB memory, and onboard graphics, and CentOS 4. Does everything I need.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[cptdondo]

Ummm... Angstrom? angstrom-distribution.org It's made to run on embedded devices. It's a PITA to build (I don't like bitbake) but you can't argue with the results.

I have a 200 MHz Arm board with 32 MB RAM running just fine with a 2.6.24 kernel. Stable as all getout. Haven't tried X11 on it (no graphics) but I might just for the hell of it. It's gotta be faster than my 486-DX4 laptop. :-)

And you can build just the parts you want so memory and footprint aren't a real problem.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[David Gerard]

To see if the hardware is supported. You really don't want to try to live on a liveCD ...

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

ah, thanks bringing these to my attention. i had suspected that such computers were out there somewhere since all the hardware components exist in one form or another, but i didn't realize that there was actually a formal name for these category of devices.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

well, price is certainly a major aspect of it, but it's not the only issue. my point is, casual computer users are becoming a significant market segment independent of business and hobbyist computer users. they have very different needs that aren't really being served by the current focus on increasing processing power.

also, casual users are still being forced to follow the upgrade cycles of hobbyist and high-end professional users just to run mundane software that's just as slow as before because of inefficient programming. there's no reason/justification for this, and they are not seeing any real benefit from such "progress" in computer technology.

i think ASUS's EEE Box ($299) is a step in the right direction. it's small, cheap, low-powered, and boots in just 7 seconds. and although i didn't know this until TrekkieTechie pointed me to the existing NetTops already being sold, it seems that both Intel and AMD have entered the ultra low-power/embedded x86 market that VIA previously had a monopoly on.

i know it's hard to understand this approach from the perspective of a power user. for you, i'm sure "casual computing" includes running a ton of processor-intensive apps that require a 2 GHZ+ processor and 2 GB of RAM, and it's worth for you to shell out an extra few hundred dollars to have the flexibility that you actually require. but consider the people for whom a few hundred extra dollars USD is a lot of money, and who won't actually use the extra power.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

well, there's a difference between an outdated computer and a modern low-power PC. see the poster's comment directly below, or TrekkieTechie's list of NetTops, which are all running Intel Atom, AMD Geode, or VIA C7 processors which are examples of modern low-power x86 processors.

but as a slashdotter, you're likely a power user who needs the extra processing power of a standard CPU. however, i'm sure even you appreciate the benefits of running more efficient software such as CentOS versus Windows Vista. and for non-power-users, being able to go from "off" to "internet" in 7 seconds is a much greater convenience than being able to run 10 programs simultaneously or being able to run multithreaded applications faster using 4 different cores.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Buelldozer]

Uhhh, excuse me sir.

15 years ago it was 2008 - 15 = 1993.

By 1993 Commodore had sold some around 50 million units. Apple had punched out the powerbook, quadra, centris and system 7. Let's not forget contributions by Atari and Amiga either.

My point is that casual / home computing DEFINITELY existed prior to the release of Windows 95. To equate one with the other is a tremendously incorrect rewriting of the history of the PC.

I can't believe that no one else called you out on this.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

i'm not the one making specious equivocations here. PC != casual computing. i was playing Prince of Persia and Cosmo's Comsic Adventure on my dad's 386 when was just 7 years old. but that was not casual computing by any stretch of the imagination. not as it exists today, not in any meaningful definition of the word.

sure consumer/home PCs existed. i never denied this (if you'd bothered to actually read my original post). but they were not used by the average person. they were a niche product for a niche market. early computer users usually needed to know how to program, or at least have a strong grasp of DOS/Unix commands. therefore, they weren't basic appliance that everyone owned.

but since we've entered the information age, casual computing has become an integral part of mainstream culture. at least 75% of the population now owns a computer and uses it on a regular basis. the internet has also become a vital resource, therefore internet devices are increasingly considered basic accessories to the digital lifestyle.

however, compared to power users like IT professionals, hardcore gamers, computer hobbyist, and skilled professionals that require high-end workstations for processor-intensive applications (ie. CAD, scientific modeling, media production, etc.), casual computer users use a relative small and fixed set of applications that are not inherently processor intensive by today's standards.

the average person really only uses the computer for the internet(web & e-mail mostly), word processing, and basic data entry. and even though processor speed doubles approximately every 2 years, the applications that casual computer users user, like the web browser, e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet apps, etc. pretty much matured and reached their present form since the advent of Windows 95. they are still continually improving, but not in step with concurrent increases in processor speeds.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[TrekkieTechie]

They made up the name after Intel made up 'netbook', it's a relatively new development -- basically a netbook's hardware in a desktop case with a desktop-sized harddrive.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[rantingkitten]

the average user should be able to accomplish everything they need to do using a 700-800 MHz low-power processor with 256 MB of RAM.

The average user already can, but since their computer gets "slow" after a while (because they load it up with crapware, never clean it or otherwise maintain it, etc), they just chuck it and get a newer one. At my office the salespeople all have 1.6ghz dual core machines with a gig of RAM, yet not one of them needs to do more than run Word, Excel, Outlook, IE, and maybe a remote desktop program for demonstrations once in a while. This is all possbile on a fairly low-end machine as long as it's installed properly and maintained, but god forbid eh? Instead they all sit around complaining how slow their fancy dual-core machines are.

Until about three years ago my only laptop was an ancient Toshiba at 266mhz with something like 300 megs of RAM, running Windows 2000 (though I occasionally pressed it into service for Debian or similar). It got the job done for the most part -- I could run Photoshop on it, Open Office, watch videos, listen to music, check email, chat on IRC and AIM. No problem.

I'm not saying everyone should go back to Pentium II chips here, but it seems that every time a better, faster, cheaper architecture comes along, users don't notice the difference because it just means they can load it with more crap and slow it down to the point where it's indistinguishable from whatever they had before.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[lysergic.acid]

exactly. a faster, overpowered processor and ridiculous surplus of memory just means they can fill their computer with more spyware/malware/viruses and assorted cruft, like auto-updaters and unnecessary startup applications, before their computer grinds to a complete halt, forcing them to take it in for maintenance. so instead of seeing people with 7-8 tray icons, you see people's computers with 15-20 programs in their system tray.

theoretically this means more time in between computer checkups/repairs. in reality, users are just more careless and indiscriminate about installing useless programs. and add to that the increase in malware/viruses floating on the internet (and increased infection rate), the average computer ends up needing maintenance just as often as before--perhaps even sooner.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, allow me to introduce you to p-states. According to PowerTOP, my modern laptop *does* run at 800 MHz when I'm browsing the web/chatting/reading email. But it's also nice to be able to run the CPU harder and use a PSX emulator, for example.

This laptop cost no more than $600. The future is now.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[FaxeTheCat]

For those who can remember from before the PC was born (which is 27 years ago), what we remember is a lot of very expensive incompatible computers. Normal people could not afford (and even less make any practiacal use of) what was then home computers.

What software, by the way?

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[2short]

"programs that are built with the expectation of 'the sky's the limit,' and hoping hardware will catch up to it."

It's not "hoping hardware will catch it"; it's noting hardware has. If I write a program or design a website that will run quite nicely on 99% of the computers people have in their homes right now, how much time and effort is it reasonable for me to spend supporting the oldest, slowest 1% ? Particularly if next year that will be 0.1%?

The inference that it's just laziness on programmers part is unwarranted. Making software work on slower hardware means more work and/or software that doesn't do as much or look as cool. Software gets written because there is a market to pay for it, or because software authors think it's fun. The rate at which new software is created for old hardware simply reflects that there isn't much market for it, and it isn't as fun to write.

Whether for fun or money , people who write for low-powered computers these days don't write for old PC's. They write for phones. Which is back to the new gizmos...

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[CAIMLAS]

you think it's the 50-year-old grandmother who uses AOL to check her e-mail and look up cooking recipes that's pushing the limits of computing technology?

Eh, no. But, consider: the AOL client on an 800MHz system with 512Mb RAM is going to be doggedly slow with the AOL client (as well as all the OEM-bundled shit, and the little "helper" applications their photo/print/scan applications installed running in the background). And that's not even including spyware!

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Buelldozer]

I tried to reply but I'd have to write a novel to cover everything I percieve as incorrect in your last post.

Let's just say that I seriously disagree with your contention that casual computing didn't exist prior to 8/10/1995 and I further disagree with the notion that most casual apps were anywhere close to mature, or even INVENTED, anytime during the era of Windows 95.

Here's a short list of things that I know didn't exist for the casual user in 1995.

1) P2P networking
2) Itunes
3) CD / DVD ripping and burning.
4) Broadband Internet connections

Have a good day.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[cyber-vandal]

None of the home computers that I'm talking about were very expensive although they were incompatible with each other. Software for the likes of the ZX Spectrum was incredibly efficiently written because it had to be. PC software authors on the other hand can write shoddy code and expect the user to fork out for hardware upgrades.
If you want a list of the computers I've owned before I got my first "inexpensive" PC (£600) they were: ZX81 (£50), ZX Spectrum (£125), Amiga 500 (£200) and Amiga 1200 (£200). Normal people could and did afford them.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[FaxeTheCat]

It seems you are comparing 25-30 year old computers with the current computers. An IBM PC when it came out had approximately the same power as a ZX or an Amiga (probably closest to the Amiga, as they used CPU's that could use more than 64k).

If the Amiga had survived it would have had 4 GB of RAM, 2 TB of disk and equally bloated software as the PC.

Software written for any of the platforms in the mid-80's had to be efficintly written. I can still remember the joy of Turbo Pascal 3.0. Editor and compiler on a floppy disk. Very efficient coding. On a PC. It is not about the platform. It is down to available technology.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[cyber-vandal]

The Amiga 1200 I had in 1994 (14 years ago) had 2MB of RAM and a 12MHz CPU and its software quite handily outperformed a 486DX2 running at 66MHz with 16MB of RAM through a combination of superior custom hardware and the willingness of developers to see how much they could push that hardware. PC developers may have started off being efficient but the ease of upgrading the hardware has made them lazy.

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[Abreu]

To be fair to some users, a lot of cruft on these computers comes from preinstalled junk

Re:That's enough computer to run Ubuntu

[try_anything]

sure consumer/home PCs existed. i never denied this (if you'd bothered to actually read my original post). but they were not used by the average person. they were a niche product for a niche market. early computer users usually needed to know how to program, or at least have a strong grasp of DOS/Unix commands. therefore, they weren't basic appliance that everyone owned.

Home computers were used by "average" people long before 1995, and most didn't require any knowledge of programming or operating system commands. Back before multitasking operating systems, there was no need for most people to interact with the operating system at all. Switching between programs could be accomplished by quitting one program, putting in the disk for another program, and rebooting.

I lived in a small, mixed-income town, and lots of teachers from elementary school up to high school learned to use the school's Apple IIe and Apple IIc computers for editing documents, making posters and calendars, and tracking their grades. The ones who could afford to bought one for their homes. In the business world, the same trickle-down effect was happening with PC compatibles, though more slowly and perhaps more limited to technically inclined folks.

Remember that the Atari 2600 sold like gangbusters at (consulting Wikipedia...) two hundred bucks in the 1970s. In the 1980s, computers were acknowledged as "the next big thing" and everyone was buying one "for the kids" so they wouldn't be left behind and left out. People who were willing to shell out 200 bucks for pure entertainment did not hesitate to shell out three or four times that amount to ensure that their kids had every educational advantage. Of course a lot of those machines got used for gaming and personal finances, not just Carmen Sandiego.

The people buying those early home computers may not have been "average" in an economic sense -- they were probably mostly middle class and upper middle class, and mostly well educated and forward-thinking, while the "average" person in the US at that time probably had a high school education and struggled hard to fit the "middle class" label -- but many of the buyers were not tech-savvy at all. Some of them bought a computer expecting to struggle with it, but believing that they had no choice in a world that was more and more permeated by computers. Some bought one because they felt left behind and obsolete and were determined that their children wouldn't be the same way.

A few of those people got more deeply interested in the technical side. They learned to program, or they bought a modem and explored MUDs and bulletin boards. The people who got deeply interested and mucked around with DOS commands were the minority. Most people just used applications, saw zero code, and didn't really know what an OS was.

No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux with a light window manager (forget KDE, sorry) and a light, yet full-featured office suite such as SoftMaker Office 2008 (www.softmaker.com/english/ofl_en.htm)

That should do the trick. 512 MByte is plenty for such a config.

Re:No problem.

[SnEptUne]

Actually, KDE works fine with 512MB of RAM. I have been using KDE4 daily on my PIII 1.3Ghz Thinkpad with 512MB of RAM. The biggest bloated software I use on the Thinkpad is Acroread, which is taking way too much memory.

Re:No problem.

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

xfce! icewm! fluxbox! evolution! ...

Re:No problem.

[Bert64]

Why are you using acroread?
Kpdf is a fine pdf viewer, far superior to adobe's bloated garbage...

If you're going with linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Thinkpad x61 Tablet that I use to take notes at school; It's running gentoo (mostly so I could have a better chance at making all the obscure features work).

If you do decide to go with linux, no matter the distro, the programs I've found useful are CellWriter, for an onscreen keyboard and handwriting recognition, and Xournal for note-taking. Xournal does well with the tablet's pressure sensitivity and higher resolution.

Re:If you're going with linux...

[maiki]

I also have an x61t, and I, too, happily run Linux (albeit Ubuntu), but I would actually recommend sticking with XP considering your needs. (My tablet came with Vista, and while I wouldn't recommend that to anybody, I think it has the same handwriting recognition software as XP)

Previously-mentioned CellWriter is a grid-entry recognition system, meaning you have to write each letter in a box. Windows has great handwriting recognition that works on whole words. Using the Journal program, I could write notes down, then open up a search box and type in a query and it would find and highlight the handwritten text matching that query. Xournal, while great software, has nothing of the sort (granted, this is not Xournal's fault, but because of the lack of real handwriting rec.)

Also, even with Powertop I never found the battery life to be very good in Ubuntu (this may just be compatibility problems with Thinkpad models). Rather, do as someone else suggested and try a SSD drive. Also, turn off your wireless card when not using it (and while you're at it, other unnecessary services).

In the end though, a tablet is indeed very usable with GNU/Linux, but Windows will give you better handwriting recognition and perhaps more power savings.

Re:If you're going with linux...

[access.name]

I have a X60 Tablet, Ubuntu 8.04 by default takes 16 Watts idle, while on Windows XP Tablet 2005, it spends 8 Watts. Is really that bad. Ubuntu 8.10 is a little better at 12 Watts idle, but still...Linux sadly don't support all the power-saving states of the Intel Low-Voltage processors.

Stay where you are

[KasperMeerts]

If you're happy with XP Tablet, why change?
Anyway, for something like that, I won't advise anything else than some sort of Unix, Ubuntu should fare well with 512 MB RAM or maybe Xubuntu would do better in this case.

Re:Stay where you are

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're happy with XP Tablet, why change?

"Me too"

Stick with XP if you're happy. Fiddle with *nix on a desktop.

Naysayers aside, I get ~7 hours of active use on my Lenovo Thinkpad x61 tablet and still have 10% left. This is with the stock 9 cell battery, wifi off and the backlight dialed down to one step above off - perfectly readable indoors.

How do I get better numbers than the vendor claims? I've tweaked the OS, bumped the ram to 4GB and save my data to an SD card in the built in reader - no need to spin the HD up and down every time I hit save. Opening and closing the lid sleeps it just fine and it gets me through a 5 class day without needing to carry the AC brick.

What wondrous OS is this? Vista Business. Yep, Vista. It works, and I have other machines (that I don't really use anymore) if I want to fiddle.

Re:Stay where you are

[vtcodger]

Let me second this. I'm no fan of Microsoft and I believe that Windows NT is a mediocre OS for Personal computers (as opposed to servers). I think that the Vista debacle is exactly what Microsoft deserved for putting their interests (single code base) above those of the users. But if XP does what you need, it's far less painful to play around and remove stuff that is unnecessary and resource hungry and perhaps find some Open Source software alternatives for specific tasks (e.g. foxit rather than acrobat reader) than to try to get everything you need running under some other OS.

Re:Stay where you are

[TClevenger]

Run your XP Tablet Edition disc through NLite and make an even lighter weight XP disc. No need to install/run software you'll never use.

Re:Stay where you are

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick with XP, it's good enough and Linux is not better in any way.

I use an Asus EeePC 901 that came with Windows XP, but which dual bootet Ubuntu Eee from the first day. I prefer Windows over Linux for several reasons.

Not only does Ubuntu take twice as long to boot and shutdown. WLAN connectivity is often flaky with Linux, especially after waking from sleep. Often it takes three tries just to into a WPA network. Adjusting the screen brightness in Linux is a mess, as it dims the screen and then goes back to 80 % instead of the value I set manually using the brightness keys (at least those work). So I have to constantly adjust it ba hand. Sound is also unreliable, sometimes it needs a reboot to start working again.
I also get one more hour of battery life using XP.

So well the only reason to use Linux is, because you want to.

Re:Stay where you are

[KasperMeerts]

I've had none of the problems you just described using Ubuntu on an Asus EEE. It also seems really improbable an Ubuntu __EEE__ remix would have problems with something as basic as the scripts for the backlight.

Why not just use XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Power management is a big issue with many Linux distros and you may be disappointed.

Re:Why not just use XP?

[SnEptUne]

It is only an issue if the person doing the installation is too ignorant to have CPU scaling, idle_timer, and other powersaving features disabled.

Arch

[realitygaps]

Try Archlinux it works great on my EEE and is faster than the other distros I tried.

I've got one of these!

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have one of these (a P1510D), and I was just thinking about this! :-)

My P1510D is running Ubuntu 8.04 and dualbooting XP Tablet Edition; the Linux side isn't as reliable as the Windows side, unfortunately. I've got a page of notes here on how I got Linux working on the thing; you need to fool around with Perl to get a touchscreen "driver" working and install another group of applications to get the buttons working.

Mine doesn't have Bluetooth, so I can't comment on that; wifi finally works out of the box, suspend is OK, hibernate is iffy, xrandr+compiz=crash, I haven't figured out how to get the fingerprint reader to work, the touchscreen "driver" likes to crap out and doesn't work too well, et cetera. Can't comment on the battery, since my battery is done for (it lasts for about 20 minutes before dying, on Windows or Linux).

If you want specifics, let me know--I've spent a few weeks digging up stuff.

Re:I've got one of these!

[peacefinder]

Yes, please, I want specifics! I have several of that model, and I'd love to have some workable option other than XP.

Re:I've got one of these!

[bugi]

Please post an URL to your notes...

Re:I've got one of these!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a substantially more modern tablet (Lenovo X61), but I've had similar experiences to my bro Anonymous Coward the 1st here.

Here's the long version:

Linux (or at least Ubuntu) on a tablet is a story of a lot of minor annoyances. Screen rotation doesn't work with Compiz, which is irritating, because it has a lot of features that would be really nice in tablet mode. Finger print reader can be made to work, but it's a hassle, which means you'll have to switch out of tablet mode to log in. So on and so on. Things are just not really /designed/ for a tablet in Linux.

I'm actually dual booting Ubuntu (Intrepid) and Vista, and I HATE Vista. It makes my swank eight month old laptop feel slow. My Vista partition (80GB) is nearly full, and my Linux partition (30GB) isn't. But most of my media is in Linux! So Vista is terrible. No argument here.

But here's one thing I'll say for Vista (and probably also XP Tablet edition): Bill Gates' weird obsession with Tablet PCs pays off noticeably. I use Linux almost exclusively, and then reboot into Windows when I need proper tablet support. The handwriting recognition is oddly good -- better than I thought it could theoretically be. I haven't found anything for Linux that comes close (I mostly use CellWriter lately). It's also much better integrated into the OS.

The tablet-centric applications also aren't there for Linux. I mostly use the thing for art, and while Gimp supports the tablet just fine, its interface just isn't meant for use with a tablet. There's nothing for Linux that comes within a million miles of Alias Sketchbook (though ArtRage, which I don't like very much, supposedly works fine through Wine). Gournal for Linux is a bit better than Windows Journal, but tablet users erect shrines to Microsoft OneNote. (I don't use it because it's not so hot for math notes.)

Anyway: I second XP Tablet and nLite, or alternatively, dual boot. But right now, if you want to get the most mileage out of your tablet, you really need Windows.

Re:I've got one of these!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, please, I want specifics! I have several of that model, and I'd love to have some workable option other than XP.

Several, huh? Could you spare a battery? ;-)

You need to add each user to the "users" group (System / Administration / Users and Groups), and install 'build-essential', 'xorg-dev', 'setserial', and 'wacom-tools'. Open up 'perl -e shell -MCPAN' in a root shell, and do 'install X11::GUITest' and 'install x11::Protocol'. Add these lines to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:
setserial /dev/ttyS0 irq 4 port 0x220 autoconfig
chmod a+rwx /dev/ttyS0
Add the fjbtndrv repository (a quick Google search will get you the instructions), and do an 'apt-get install fscd fsc-btns-modules-`uname -r'. Add 'fujitsu-laptop' and 'fsc_btns' to your /etc/modules.

Now you can install Sam Engstrom's touchscreen "driver" (again, Google to the rescue) and fjbtndrv will be working (tablet buttons). If you fool around with it, you can make fjbtndrv and tablet6.pl work together, and you'll have a reasonably usable setup. (Don't forget to add tablet6.pl to your startup items.)

This is admittedly very brief and light on details, but it's got the essential pieces (which I spent a while digging up across various forums). The fjbtndrv wiki and Sam Engstrom's site should take care of the rest. (There's also a real X driver on conan.de, which I haven't been able to get working; you might want to look into that. I don't know if it even works with the current X, but I don't know too much about X drivers.)

There's a patched version of Compiz floating around somewhere that works with xrandr, though I've lost the link--it's somewhere on Launchpad. There are also two or three websites primarily about Ubuntu on the P1510, which though out of date have useful information. I'd give them a look, too.

Hope this helps!

Several options...

[Flapjack]

Tiny 2003-Vista Edition runs great on older machines using very little resources - people are playing around with the asus EEE version of WinXP as well and the Beast edition of TinyXP. Otherwise, I prefer an older debian-based version of Mepis. DSL (Damn Small Linux) might be an option as well. I'd say that's probably fast enough to run straight WinXP though.

Re:Several options...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say that's probably fast enough to run straight WinXP though.

Windows XP Tablet Edition is XP Pro with a few extra tablet features, just like XP MCE is XP Pro with media center features bolted on. (So you can actually run IIS on your tablet, though I'm not sure why you'd want to...)

captcha: inequity

Re:Several options...

[akita]

I dont't think you know what "tinyxp" is (hint: not something you buy from MS), your answer doesn't make any sense.

options

[itzdandy]

I *WANT* to tell you to put some ubuntu on there and tweak it up a bit.

The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.

For a Tablet, batter life is a pretty big thing I think and this is a major issue. I get as much as 30% less battery life out of linux.

That being said, linux has come a long way on this front and this may be remedied pretty soon.

Also, with ubuntu 8.10 as well as new releases of fedora the wireless management is much better.

If you are not concerned with battery life then definitely grab a newer linux distro. Remember that you need to do a number of tweaks for power such as turning the swapiness down and selecting the proper power states.

Re:options

[the_other_chewey]

*WANT* to tell you to put some ubuntu on there and tweak it up a bit.

The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.

With a tickless kernel (since around 2.6.20, iirc), this shouldn't be an issue anymore. And with 'powertop' being a
nice tool to assign blame, a lot of applications are fixed to support this as well. It really makes a huge difference.

Re:options

[Svartalf]

The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP. I run linux on my laptop and have on other laptops and linux sucks down the battery faster.

And as a developer, I will state that I've had the opposite experience with Ubuntu on my HP Pavilion dv9000 (Never booted with Vista while in my possession...) and, the previous Pavilion dv6000, the Compaq Evo n800, and my eeePC.

Keep in mind the eeePC with Xandros runs better and actually has a slightly better life than the XP install on the same class of machine. If your claim is correct, why is this the case?

Re:options

[xenocide2]

For a netboot / tablet, there's also the Ubuntu Netbook Remix which has some interesting (if a bit beta) programs to improve the experience. It's actually quite good on my larger, overpowered tablet.

Re:options

[laffer1]

MidnightBSD uses less power on my ThinkPad T30 than Windows XP SP3. I have powerd and cpufreq running which lowers battery usage significantly. FreeBSD out of the box isn't great, but it can be tweaked to be quite energy efficient.

As others pointed out, Linux has the tickless kernel option which is excellent.

Further, I would say Windows power consumption is worse because many people run antivirus or other background apps that they don't need in a *nix system.

I also noticed less power usage while plugged in. Using a kill-a-watt, I saw a 7 watt difference when the system was idle in bsd vs windows. I think this has to due with the fact that in a gui, powerd is able to get the cpu down to 450mhz in BSD but it runs much higher in windows.

The system includes a 1.6Ghz Pentium M + 512MB ram, a DVD drive and a hitatchi 120GB 5400 RPM hard drive. (it came with a 20GB drive)

I also notice gains in BSD over windows on power use on my desktop.

Re:options

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real reason that this isnt the best option is that Linux (and BSD) are heavier on battery life than WindowsXP.

That's only because Linux and BSD actually do something.

Re:options

[David Gerard]

YMMV. With Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.27, I find precisely the opposite: XP runs 2 hours, 8.04 runs 3.5 to 4 hours. I blame the shitty, shitty McAfee antivirus on the Windows installation (it's my work laptop); but antiviruses aren't optional on Windows, and have a notable tendency to cripple the machine and suck power.

Re:options

[jawee]

I have had the same experience with 6 laptops (used by me and my family) over the years. Linux has great battery life in general.

Re:options

[Bert64]

According to the eee documentation, it can do 5 hours battery life with xandros and 8 with xp, it explains what software they used to come to this...
But it does just seem the benchmarking program on xp is just far less accurate than the linux one.

Re:options

[motang]

I have a HP dv5000z and Ubuntu has been great on it. It see all the media buttons, touch pad is supported, hibernate works, and much faster than Win XP Pro SP2 running on it.

Re:options

[Chewbacon]

I can get another 45 minutes to an hour out of my Thinkpad T60p with Ubuntu because it isn't spinning the hard disk like Vista (it's dual boot) seems to do when I'm idle. On top of that, it's great when I'm on the go through airports or a day of class when I'm suspending the laptop often. Set your power setting right in Ubuntu and with its package management it's a nice choice.

Re:options

[itzdandy]

agreed to some extent. I just posted a different follow up pointing out that video drivers are much weaker in terms of power management vs windows drivers. That and linux likes to cache and swap a lot which hits the hard disk more than XP does typically.

Also, though Vista has a much much better power management system to XP, it is much much worse on battery because it likes to grind the system pretty much constantly.

Re:options

[itzdandy]

I suppose that this is comparing oranges to appricots. Windows does need more apps running but if good choices are made they have less impact. McAfee or Norton are not on that list.

Re:options

[itzdandy]

Key point here is vista. vista is junk. it is so bad that I opened up my websters dictionary and under the work vista it said:

[v-ist-a], noun: term formerly used to describe a beautiful view, please dont use this work in that context any more. Word meaning is now used to describe poor operating with excessive overhead. ex. Wow, did you see that old beater impalla on the highway with the $4000 rims? that was some vista.

That revalation being said, we are comparing XP to linux in battery life, vista is a different beast and linux handly smashes it in all reguards

Re:options

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that, on all Linux installs I have done so far the battery life was about 30% better than on XP. Why, I guess one key factor is to have much ram, Linux swaps way less than XP which thrashes the disk on a constant base even if enough ram is present. If you can combine that with power saving features (HD spin down etc...) you will get a lot of power down time of your hd, while in windows the hd constantly runs!

Just my 2c!

Underpowered tablet you say?

[Caboosian]

Clearly the territory of Windows Vista.

Re:Underpowered tablet you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously there are going to be a lot of Vista jokes, but it's worth noting that Vista can actually run quite well on a netbook. I'm typing this on an MSI Wind with Vista Ultimate right now. I've even enabled Aero glass. The only caveat is that you'll want to install SP1 and disable a few services (superfetch, windows search, and windows defender).

Re:Underpowered tablet you say?

[thexile]

Yah these are the benefits of Vista by turning off the features.

I think this is the perfect OS for you.

[neo]

http://www.zimmers.net/geos/GEOSFAQ.html

You'll have incredible speed based on the original purpose and you will also have access to many free applications.

Re:I think this is the perfect OS for you.

[gilgongo]

http://www.zimmers.net/geos/GEOSFAQ.html

You'll have incredible speed based on the original purpose and you will also have access to many free applications.

Not quite. The OP is running i386

Re:I think this is the perfect OS for you.

[neo]

I think I was trying to be funny.

'story' tags

[dnwq]

You know, the stoptaggingeverythingstory and !story tags are getting more annoying than the story tags to begin with.

Anyone else feel the same way?

Re:'story' tags

[rikkards]

I think tags are annoying and wish there was a way to get rid of them. Especially since they are whatever you want to put in.

Re:'story' tags

[Anonymous Coward]

"story" is the cancer killing slashdot?

Ah-hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

MikeOS should do the trick! mikeos.berlios.de

Some form of Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn off all services which you don't use, minimize the number of processes. Don't use big background applications like virus scanners or personal firewalls. The windows firewall is fine.

Windows is still a lot better at saving power than Linux and if you strip it down to the essentials, it runs nicely on very modest hardware. Microsoft is going to be in trouble if they're not planning to make a replacement for Windows XP with the same shoe size though.

Re:Some form of Windows XP

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

windows flp ftw!

Re:Some form of Windows XP

[SnEptUne]

Is that comparing apple with orange? What about "stripping" down the so-called Linux to the essentials and then compares them.

Re:Some form of Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows needs to be stripped down to be able to run on modest hardware. With Linux you add what you need until your machine can't take any more. In both cases you get a system which fits the hardware. That's not the point. The point is that Windows XP can run on such hardware, and when it does, it works better than Linux. Notebooks and tablets are relatively specialized hardware and the power management requirements are of high importance if these devices are meant to be used as designed. Unfortunately Linux is playing catch up in this domain, and the job is not quite done yet. Additionally, these systems are old, so they were built in a time when Linux support was even worse than it is today. That means they were built around Windows and getting all features to work with Linux can be a problem. Conclusion: If Windows XP is not too big for the hardware, it's the best option, and since it scales down amazingly well, it's worth trying (if you have a Windows XP license lying around, that is.)

Re:Some form of Windows XP

[motang]

AV program ClamWin should do the trick very well. Lightweight and works well.

Re:Some form of Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to have antivirus, that may be a useful tip, but personally I prefer not to waste battery life on unnecessary disk accesses and processing. I find it simpler to secure the system and pay attention instead of entrusting my system to software which, by design, can only defend against threats which have caused significant damage in the wild.

OS-X?

[MathFox]

I wonder why nobody suggested OS-X so far... It is a hack to install on non-Apple hardware, but you'll get the best usability. A Linux or BSD distro will make a usable machine too and as others may have said: sticking with XP is an option too.
Your preference matters most, you'll work with the machine.

Re:OS-X?

[TheRaven64]

OS X in 512MB of RAM is not snappy or responsive. It's usable, but it's not a great experience. I'd probably suggest FreeBSD on a machine like this - I run it on a few machines with similar specs and (especially with the ULE scheduler for desktop use) it's very responsive. I'd also be tempted to suggest Haiku if you aren't planning on running anything that hasn't already been ported to it. BeOS R5 was very fast on a 200MHz machine with 64MB of RAM, even with several things being done at once.

Re:OS-X?

[Graff]

I wonder why nobody suggested OS-X so far

Mac OS X is a good choice if you are 100% hardware compatible and you have a decent amount of RAM, around 640 MB or more in my experience. If your hardware isn't 100% compatible then you tend to run into issues with the power management features and your battery life will suffer.

Yes, the usability of Mac OS X is high, even on unsupported hardware, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone using an old, brand-x laptop. For this sort of situation I'd probably go with Ubuntu or similar. Power management can also be a bit tricky under Linux but it has a better chance at dealing with random stuff thrown at it and it has gotten a lot better with battery life in its last few iterations.

Re:OS-X?

[Anonymous Coward]

It maybe because we're generally not crazed and oblivious Apple fanboys.

Re:OS-X?

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, you need a chip that supports at least SSE2 to run Hackintosh OS X. And already with SSE2, it's emulating certain things so it's sluggish. A P3 chip doesn't have SSE2 neither SSE3.

On top of that, even if you have super compatible hardware, OS X on a normal PC isn't always all pretty and roses. I played with Hackintosh on a decently compatible PC and experienced frequent crashes and instability issues. My friend also experienced similar issues and he had specifically built his computer by following the Hackintosh HCL.

Re:OS-X?

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

osx on spec for spec hardware has run perfect for me. better than a mac pro, in fact... since I can open it up and change stuff!

Re:OS-X?

[laffer1]

OS X is not usable with 512MB ram. That isn't enough ram for Mail.app. Sadly, Mail.app is my reference app for when I need a new Mac.

Re:OS-X?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not going to work on a P3 (sse2 is a must) - and if somehow you do manage to get it to work, it'll work ass slow.

Re:OS-X?

[anaesthetica]

Also, the next release, Snow Leopard, is specifically designed for mobile machines (laptops and iPhones). Should see significant gains in battery life, memory footprint, and performance on low power systems.

Re:OS-X?

[prestomation]

Keep in mind it is a tablet. Has OSX EVER appeared on a touchscreen machine(besides the iphone)? I don't know if OSX provides the kinds of utilities needed with an input like a touchscreen. And the old hardware has already been addressed.

Re:OS-X?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this with a X60 Tablet and it ran very well, it booted in about 20 seconds, but battery life was pretty pathetic compared to Vista. Also, the handwriting recognition was terribly slow, (probably was being emulated from the old PowerPC code.) In the end I gave up on it mostly because I love Microsoft One Note so much.

Sorry about AC, usually don't have anything to say, so never bothered to register.

Re:OS-X?

[cbhacking]

Hmm... it's a tablet PC. Does OS X have any support for that kind of thing? Even the iPhone stuff doesn't count, since that's a finger-driven (as opposed to primarily or exclusively stylus-driver) interface. Certainly I've never heard of handwriting recognition in OS X, and that's one feature that Vista, at least, does very well indeed (never had an XP tablet).

SSD or Compact Flash?

[niko9]

Maybe replace the hard disk with an SSD or low power compact flash?

If you go the CF route then check out Voyage Linux. 'Tis like Debian but made for embedded and low power machines. http://linux.voyage.hk/

(I use it with a PC Engines single board computer running MPD as a source for an audiophile grade USB music server. Just install th OS to CF and apt-get what you need.)

Ubuntu w/Netbook Remix

[Neil Jansen]

Ubuntu 8.x with Netbook Remix interface installed. The desktop interface is touchscreen friendly. Window-picker applet and Maximus do a great job of saving you screen real-estate.

Re:Ubuntu w/Netbook Remix

[Doug Neal]

Agreed, but probably best to wait for 8.10. 8.04 falls quite short in terms of hardware support for netbooks. It is possible to get them about 85% working with a lot of manual tweaking. 8.10's newer kernel works much better with netbook hardware, and the netbook remix packages are also much better integrated.

I also hear that Fedora 10 works nicely with netbooks, if that's your thing.. personally I much prefer something Debian based.

Re:Ubuntu w/Netbook Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I tried Fedora, yum was eating like 100+ MB of ram EVERY time I used it. I don't think fedora would be a good choice for a netbook.

Re:Ubuntu w/Netbook Remix

[AndyboyH]

Mod this up

just this weekend, I installed Ubuntu eee on my fiancee's eee 701. Boot up time feels 'slightly' slower (i.e. perhaps 1.1 times longer at most) but the OS, firefox, etc feel faster, and doing upgrades/installs of packages with native apt-get/synaptic is just FAR FAR better.

I would agree with one of the sibling comments though that it's a bit hokey still in the current stable build - I had to do a bit of bios hackery to get the webcam working, edit fstab to get USB drives to be recognised (although the card reader worked first time) and the battery life indicator seems to be completely and utterly wrong at the moment, but it's far more *usable* than Xandros on the eee.

Puppy

[Trenchbroom]

Puppy linux. Running it right now on my eeepc 2g surf--800 Celeron with 512 MB. Works great!

My experience...

[Landshark17]

The hard drive on my three-year-old laptop died recently, and I replaced it with a new one. I didn't feel like jumping through hoops to prove I had a legit copy of XP to get it re-installed, or worse being unable to prove it and have to pay. So I put the latest version of Ubuntu on it and it's running smooth.

Re:My experience...

[Lumpy]

Actually that is a big power savings. I got almsot 40% more laptop battery life out of my incredibly old G4 iBook by upgrading the hard drive to a recent segate that was not only a 5200rpm drive but the newer tech. the spot where the drive sits is now drastically cooler, the ibook is faster than it ever was, and I get more life.

Step1 - upgrade to a hard drive that uses less power.
  Bet I get more battery life from that than any OS change could give me.

Linux or Windows?

[malevolentjelly]

If you're looking for linux recommendations, I can't recommend Mandriva 2009 enough for this purpose. With their experience with the Classmate PC, Mandriva went ahead and integrated all their smooth netbook features into their OS. Mandriva 2009 in particular now provides an available default LXDE desktop, which is far lighter than KDE or Gnome and less spartan than XFCE. In addition, any configuration settings dialogs deficient in LXDE can be made up with the Mandriva Control Center.

On that same note, you might consider gOS 3, which will provide a lovely and lightweight interface on top of Ubuntu but customized directly for the needs of a netbook. It's a very realistic distribution, with ample codecs, default Wine, and a nice implmentation of Mozilla Prism for running web apps as desktop apps. (not that that makes any sense)

Now, if you're looking for a Windows system, there's always Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC's, a smooth and lightweight XP installatiion weighing in at under a gig default and using the XP embedded kernel. You can find that lyin' around somewhere on the web if you look hard enough- though you can't buy it. Oh yes, and it's full XP with no activation subsystem. ;)

Re:Linux or Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if you're looking for a Windows system, there's always Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC's, a smooth and lightweight XP installatiion weighing in at under a gig default and using the XP embedded kernel. You can find that lyin' around somewhere on the web if you look hard enough- though you can't buy it. Oh yes, and it's full XP with no activation subsystem. ;)

Is that's what's being packaged with the Dell Mini? I saw one with XP in a computer store on a college campus and I literally said "what" when I saw it.

Re:Linux or Windows?

[Creepy Crawler]

Well... That slimmed down XP sounds darned interesting. I think I'll add it to my netboot options over my lan for possible installation.

And after a long and hard search, 30 seconds later, here's the link.

Since you cant buy it, I see no reason why we cant download and use it. It does need a cdkey, from that which you will need yours.

Re:Linux or Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

ermm... http://www.legendarydevils.com/utilities/74893-windows-xp-performance-edition-sp3.html is good at 250mb.
*cough* http://www.legendarydevils.com/misc/74507-microsoft-windows-microxp-v0-82-a.html if you like it much smaller.

Windows XP

[richardtallent]

Ok, flame-proof suit going on...

Linux might offer some improvement, but OpenOffice is dog-slow compared to Office 2000/2002.

So if word processing and spreadsheet use is more than minimal, I'd suggest sticking with XP, unless, perhaps, you can get Office to run under WINE.

Just replace IE6/7 with Firefox or Chrome for web browsing, and consider Thunderbird for email.

Re:Windows XP

[pablomme]

unless, perhaps, you can get Office to run under WINE

Which you can. There are options other than OpenOffice.org for Office replacements, in any case.

Re:Windows XP

[dhasenan]

In the past, I've experienced, say, Excel loading in a third the time of OOCalc. I've also experienced OOCalc loading much faster than Excel, and these experiences are much more recent.

If there's a speed difference between the two, it'll probably change within the next year or two. I wouldn't use that as a basis for choosing between them.

Re:Windows XP

[AceofSpades19]

There are more F/OSS office suites then just openoffice my friend

Depends on inherent Linux compatability

[damentz]

Netbooks that were designed with Linux in mind will most likely experience longer battery life with a recent Linux _and_ modern distribution of your choice.

You need to remember to insure you're using the correct module per hardware device. This really is only a problem with wireless and graphics where an alternative reverse engineered or incomplete open source driver is used instead of the full featured proprietary driver. Here's some examples:

ati, via, nvidia, broadcom (fuck these guys, srsly)

Then just remember to _enable_ powersaving features if they exist such as cpufreq with ondemand, intel wireless power management, sata link control, hard disk power management, pci express, and if possible - dynamic clock control for gpu's (nvidia does this already by default in their proprietary driver).

Just another note, modern Linux distros also use the tickless kernel option by default so you're already saving more power on the cpu than you would in XP would (disregarding cpu clock speed/voltage modulation) when idle.

Re:Depends on inherent Linux compatability

[Creepy Crawler]

That's why when I went with my new laptop, I went with a T61 Thinkpad with every bit of intel equipment I could get. I stayed away from Nvidia and Broadcomm both, so I could get Intel gfx and Intel abg wireless. I did choose to go with 4G ram, because I virtualize a few OSes here and there for certain purposes as testing or console playing.

Suffice it to say, everything on my laptop works 100% with Linux. It runs even better than Windows does (it had vista basic cause they offered no freedos). And with, albeit unstable 8.10, everything runs fine... considering I never used .gvfs anyways. I hate that gnome-only mounting system as I'd rather use pyNeighborhood anyways and have it hook up to ~/mnt/$name_of_computer/$name_of_share/

Debian, for example

[Timosch]

A couple of years ago, I ran Debian Woody on an AMD K6, 300 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 4 MB Video RAM, 8 GB HDD. Just for surfing, writing, spreadsheets etc. It worked fine, even under KDE (although I would recommend xfce or similar under such conditions).

I'm using a P1510 right now

[wiredlogic]

I'm using a P1510 and I love it. I don't consider it underpowered at all as long as your goal isn't to run cutting edge games. It runs XP and Linux great. Fujitsu got the netbook concept right 3 years ago when everyone else was still making SUV notebooks. I transport it in a convenient, portable DVD player case.

The best feature is the ULV Pentium M which can be heavily undervolted to conserve battery life and reduce heat output. With the extended battery I can get 6+ hours running at 600MHz, 0.7V. For XP, set up NHC to configure the lower voltages. For Linux, use the PHCkernel patch to override the BIOS voltage settings and configure cpufreq for ondemand at all times.

This machine is quite usable with 512MB if you keep Windows lean on active processes. It gets better with the 1GB upgrade if you can find the memory. The only big problem with this machine is the obsolete connector for the 1.8" HD limits you to an 80GB max drive. If you're lucky you can snag a replacement cable for the newer P1620 (find a broken one cheap) that supports the newer ZIF connector.

Re:I'm using a P1510 right now

[wiredlogic]

Oh yeah, I forgot. Having a built-in three-button mouse rocks for select/paste in X.

Re:I'm using a P1510 right now

[RiotingPacifist]

For those of us without 3 button mice, two finger tapping on touchpads also rocks.

Re:I'm using a P1510 right now

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the reference to NHC. First time I've seen this software, and it looks interesting. I am using a P1610d.

http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc.htm

If you are going the windows route ...

[phoxix]

Windows XP SP3 + nLite > Every other version of Windows.

It works with 99.999% of everything, and doesn't suck hard like Beasta

512MB and Xp runs bad?!?

[kipman725]

ok your laptop is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than any pc available at XP's launch. I would recomend reinstalling as xp should be pretty fast. If that fails to improve things then your notebook has something seriously wrong with it. As for linux distros debian net install with flux box. My desktop is only slightly better than that laptop and I run an XP/debian duel boot with no issues.

Use Puppy Linux

[biggaijin]

I am writing this on an old Fujitsu P2010 running Puppy Linux. I am completely satisfied with this setup. A full-sized Linux distribution is slow to boot and slow to run on this machine. I used to have Ubuntu installed on it and the performance was not acceptable. Puppy boots quickly and provides all the facilities that you asked for.

Re:Use Puppy Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that emotion. Just last night I got puppy up and running on a Sony Viao from 2000 with 128 mb ram. Boots in 25 seconds and gives me everything I need for basic computing tasks.

The new version (4.1) is easier to install than ever, and hooks you up automatically to repositories for image editing, viewing, music software, etc.

Not sure about the power consumption, though. That computer has to be plugged in all the time.

What it came with

[Matey-O]

I've got an AspireOne. I've had a BUNCH of different *ix's on it and ended up going back to Linpus (after using all that I'd learned on the other OS's to get it to do what I want.) Sure, it doesn't have wobbly windows, but it DOES have the latest Firefox, AND it returns dependably from sleep, has a working wifi switch, and boots in under 20 seconds. I found all I REALLY wanted in that form factor was FireFox 3 (F11 full screen is GREAT), and a shell. recompiling the Wifi drivers with every Ubuntu kernel update was getting to be a PITA.

Linux Drivers?

[Dr. Zim]

I'm using a Fujitsu LT 500C and having great performance on plain ol' XP SP2. For all the cool kids running Linux out there, what do you do about pen drivers and on screen keyboards? These two are absolutely critical requirements of a tablet computer for me.

My experience Fujitsu 7010

[fygment]

I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on a Fujitsu 7010. The reason is that the laptop is very light, a feature I seek for extended travel. But battery life, my other top desired feature, is still poor ... maybe 3 hours tops. I have found that Ubuntu can't do hibernate or suspend with this machine and that is rather important for extending battery life. My conclusion has been to order an AspireOne in the hopes of getting extended battery life (apparently up to 6 hours).

I don't think software is the answer in your case. I think some hardware hacking may be easiest. Put in an SSD HD and upgrade the battery. Those mods and keeping the existing OS (which is exactly tailored to the machine) will likely meet your goals.

OS != distribution

[Gothmolly]

Clearly, the best OS is Linux, or perhaps an nLite-d version of Win98. HOWEVER, assuming you do mean Linux, don't confuse the OS with the distribution. Remember, the choice of WM is yours not tied to the OS.

Re:OS != distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't confuse a kernel with an OS, assuming you didn't mean GNU/Linux.

Tiny XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Uses only 80MB ram after boot. Great for small Machines...

For the eee

[thatskinnyguy]

eeebuntu Standard Edition seems to be working out great on my eee. Everything just works right out of the box. Installation was a bit of a bitch though.

Mandriva with Windows dual boot

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Mandriva 2008 and 2008.1 on a couple of older IBM laptops and it runs great in both instances. (X31 with 1.5 GB RAM and Pentium M 1.4 GHz plus T23 with 1.2 GHz and 1 GB RAM) I have wireless with either Broadcom or Atheros chips and all other items that make them equal or better than XP in Linux including multi media playback, web surfing or office type file usage. I find the battery to last very well with Linux in both machines. Mandriva will help you re-size the files on the hard drive and make space for Linux with Windows.

CPU Throttling?

[fygment]

Oh, and you might try finding something that throttles the CPU clock back. I've been wondering about this since using the Irex Iliad e-book machine. In attempts to extend battery life in the Iliad, the CPU freq is throttled back. Is there any software that does that dynamically say when running a word processor, surfing, email, etc.?

Re:CPU Throttling?

[RiotingPacifist]

do you mean throttled or scaled, either way its part of the kernel of most modern operating systems, for more control there are userspace controllers for all OSs too.

Xfce, Fluxbox, FVWM

[SgtChaireBourne]

I run Kubuntu 8.04 on a Compaq Evo N410c, which is a 1.2GHz P-III with 512MB memory. It's just fine.

Indeed, it's not so much a matter of the distro but more of the window manager or desktop environment. I'm also generally using KDE. On one netbook, however, I prefere FVWM, simply because I use it for a few things and don't need *any* eye candy or fancy menus. However, as you get into weaker processors and smaller RAM, other desktop environments might be more enjoyable. Xfce and Fluxbox come to mind.

One fact that is not as widely known as it could be is that just about any distro can be modified through adding or removing packages and themes, and changing configurations, to be identical to any other. As an example, Fluxbuntu can be grown into Kubuntu by adding the package kubuntu-desktop.

Budget Constraints?

[Anonymous Coward]

A) are you under a budget? No? Pay someone to install whatever you want.

B) are you willing to steal software? Yes, grab that WinXP for legacy computers from "somewhere" and have at it.

C) If you have zero budget and aren't willing to steal - some form of Ubuntu and Linux are my recommendation though I don't know how much tablet screen use you'll get from it.

I run an Internet Tablet, N800, with Linux and it goes a few days between charges with email and lite web browsing over wifi. The screen is too small for ebook, PDF or word processing unless you're really, really desperate. I've blogged for a few weeks at a time when on vacation, but was able to charge it nightly while uploading 40+ photos to my server. Using the GPS eats power much quicker, so don't get lost if you can help it. ;)

Dare I suggest Win2k?

[xeos]

I recently did a head to head comparison between Win2k and Xubuntu on a 800mhz Thinkpad with 384MB. Both ran pretty well, but Win2k had the distinct advantage of booting faster, as well as resuming from hibernate faster. If you intend to carry the machine around with you and use it during the 10 minutes between classes, etc, then that's pretty important.

Once loaded, however, both OSes were perfectly snappy. More details:

http://alantechreview.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-os-is-best-for-low-end-laptop.html

http://alantechreview.blogspot.com/2008/10/evaluating-linux-for-low-end-laptop-my.html

Re:Dare I suggest Win2k?

[cool_arrow]

It would have been interesting to try that comparison with vector linux. I've been reading a little bit about it and I'd be curious to to know if it's worth using the VL-hot feature. From what I understand HAL continually polls the hardware and makes an underpowered machine slower. VL-hot allows you to mount devices with a click and there is no polling of hardware. Not sure how much of a difference it really makes though.

If you are really curious about running Mac OS X

[nawcom]

Does this lspci dump match yours? http://launchpadlibrarian.net/8213720/lspcivnn.txt - this is supposed to be from a Fujitsu P1510D if it makes any difference or not. With those specs - sound, video, wireless, lan, and more should work just fine as there are support for them. The touchscreen will work but it will need some tweaking. If you want to try this just for shits and giggles (assuming you purchased a license for leopard) we could help you get it going at irc.osx86.hu #hackint0sh.

Ubuntu

[Miseph]

Before my third hand Pentium III laptop's screen died I was running standard (Gnome) Ubuntu on it just fine. The was around Feisty, mind you, but so long as I turned off the beryl-compiz effects and kept an eye on what extraneous packages I installed it ran like a champ on 512 MB of memory and an 8 GB hdd. Battery life was also decent until the battery wore out, but once I replaced it I could use it for a couple of hours with sound and networking on battery.

I'd imagine that Ubuntu with Gnome would work fine on, say, an Asus eee, considering that they have about the same hardware specs but benefit from general tech improvements (like better batteries) and haven't been subjected to 5+ years of (ab)use.

Sorry for the lameness/obviousness of that answer, but it's really obvious because it's true.

MS DOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS DOS is pretty snappy from my experience.

Surprise: Vista will work

[djelovic]

This will get modded down or up as funny as anything mentioning Microsoft here, but I have to say it: Vista will work fine.

I have a five year old old HP TC1100 tablet that has a 1.1 GHz Celeron inside. I use it for web surfing, reading and watching TV shows or movies when I take my dog to the park. It had XP Tablet PC edition on it.

Two months ago the hard disk died (I'm pretty hard on hardware) so I decided to try Vista, which I heard has an improved UI for tablet PCs. So I went out and bought a gig of RAM for $40 thus upgrading the computer to 1.5 gigs. I replaced the hard disk with an ancient 4200 IDE disk I had in a drawer somewhere. Then I installed Vista.

Verdict: Big improvement. Vista really does the whole Tablet PC thing better and the computer with the new RAM feels more responsive than it ever did.

Dejan

Re:Surprise: Vista will work

[caluml]

-1, Must be hallucinating?

BeOS/Haiku OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Haiku OS if the development continue at this speed will be my #1 choice in 2009. Latest pre-alpha build i tested really impressed me.

www.haiku-os.org

PDF, Office, light duty?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you actually look at what goes on inside of a PDF or a modern Office document of any kind, you might find an aweful lot to keep a CPU busy.

Tablets and linux

[Nightspirit]

Tablets typically don't play very well under linux, with subpar handwriting recognition and at least with older fujitsus they lack drivers for screen rotation and tablet button functionality. I got a recommendation for openSUSE but it was still rather difficult to get half the functionality.

However, your tablet is quite dated, so I would recommend a custom tablet XP installation using nlite or similar tools. Bumping up the ram to 1gb should make it tolerable.

Do you actually want to use the machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're actually going to use the machine to get work done there are only two choices.

1. Some version of Windows (probably XP). This really isn't best because of all the activation/DRM shit but if you must run Windows...

2. Run Ubuntu (preferably the latest 8.10 which is being released in a few days).

OS X is out because it's a total hack to make it work in the first place. It'll break at some point after an upgrade and it's just generally a pain in the ass to keep running on non-Apple hardware. Plus it's getting pretty crappy as of Leopard, it's regressing in terms of performance, stability, and usability.

Any Linux distro other than Ubuntu is out too. It's not necessarily that Ubuntu is all that much better than any other distro technically, it's better because Ubuntu is the mainstream Linux distro and you're going to get the best and longest lasting support. It's goal is to "just work" and for the most part that's what it does. It does it better than Windows.

Feel free to use something else if you don't mind spending lots of time screwing around with the OS. Personally I find that a waste of time.

Re:Do you actually want to use the machine?

[Budenny]

No, this is quite wrong. Debian Lenny with Fluxbox and WDM is the answer.

Re:Do you actually want to use the machine?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do Fluxbox and WDM on Ubuntu too... Ubuntu's release cycle kills Debian. Plus they do the work to add the tiny tweaks that make the system more friendly and usable for the people that don't want to waste time screwing around with the OS (not that Debian isn't friendly, Ubuntu just does it one step better).

Debian is great too but again, if you don't want to screw around messing with the OS then the best choice is the most popular mainstream distro because it's going to have the most work put into it.

ubuntu + fluxbox

[airuck]

I still use my little Sharp Actius PC-MM10 for travel. It's certainly underpowered with a 1GHz transmeta chip, fixed 256MB of RAM, and a 15GB hard drive. I net installed the basic Ubuntu 7.10 and then added xorg and fluxbox. I would not call it snappy, but it does everything I need it to do. It is smaller than an Apple Air. Here is a photo.

a Linux option

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprise nobody suggest Linux Gentoo so far to squeeze out every drop of performance available on the machine. If you just use the right flag for compiling and start with a low stage you may get good performance out of it. Portage to get only what is needed.

Bring OpenOffice, VLC, Firefox and you are in business.

Not just 450mhz Celeron, but, only 64-192mb RAM!

[Anonymous Coward]

I neglected to mention that my pal using Windows 2000 not only does well on it (running quickly & doing what he needs), but it only has 192mb of RAM on it (& had done pretty ok on just 64mb before THAT no less), in addition to ONLY having a 450mhz CELERON CPU on it. Additionally, his system has EXTREMELY slow disks (by way of comparison to today's, ranging from 7,200rpm-15,000rpm models from the SATA/SCSI world) - they're only 5,400rpm units of EIDE variety no less!

Windows 2000 does VERY WELL on it, I was pleasantly surprised in fact.

(Again: Especially once we "tuned/tweaked" it (via .reg file hacks, & also trimming out background startup group apps, registry RUN areas, etc. + services trimmed off he did NOT require)? His machine does VERY well!)

Considering the OP is asking that the OS in question must run quickly on 1.2ghz?

Again, from the Windows NT-based OS' of modern variety, Windows 2000 fits his bill, quite nicely!

APK

Lifebook =/= Netbook

[thereofone]

Irrespective of how "similar" they are otherwise:

Subcompact notebooks (especiallly tablets) are almost always >$1200 and are not particularly more useful to the general computing public

Netbooks are more like $500, you can hand one to grandma, and if it gets stolen or damaged it's not going to be a big ordeal

Try them out - LiveCD

[archiDORK]

An OS you like to use is influnced by many demensions beyond simple power. There are many liveCDs out there, pick up a few distros of Linux and try them out. That said xp is not too bad either. Just now I am using Ubuntu on my notebook. Prior to that I had Xubuntu and Wolvix installed. Have some fun and play around with it a bit. In the end you have to make up your own mind. Check out Wikipedia Linux overview. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions

FREEEEE

[Yeb]

http://freeeee.org/

FREEEEE - 100% Free Software GNU/Linux for Eee

Re:FREEEEE

[Anonymous Coward]

How have you you managed to get that through the lameness filter?

Re:FREEEEE

[skeeto]

For a moment I was wondering how such obvious spam got modded up. The "100% free" thing set off my mental spam/advertising filter, and I almost was not even aware of your post due to banner blindness.

But now I see it is entirely relevant.

I have an eeepc 900 and

[DanZ23]

I run Gentoo on it. I get 830 vs 450 fps in glxgears compared to the stock kernel and AsusLauncher/Xandros. I love this pc

Best OS for Netbook is Linux...

[Fri13]

You should use Linux as your OS for netbook, you have wide range of different distributions of it where you can easily choose what kind software system you like. Example, select a minimal system and what installer can be started from USB stick. Then install OS + basic system to get a commandline and install all needed software from network. Of course you need to compile your OS self (Linux kernel) to get all power savings etc if it has not done for you.

For distributions I would suggest just a one, not Ubuntu or any other than Mandriva what 2009 release includes support for all netbook machines. The OS is compiled for such machines and system includes LXDE, a very small desktop environment and Mandriva has even designed it's system tools for netbook monitors (1024x600). I have tried Ubuntu 8.04.1 and Mandriva 2009 on Acer Aspire One and Asus EeePC 901 models and Mandriva was best system for those machines. Ubuntu needs too much tweakin and even compiling OS yourself untill you get it in good state and override those sound and wireless bugs what it has by default, even that you would use the Ubuntu "made" for netbooks.

I liked the Linpus Linux distribution but because it was based to Fedora and I have never be such big fan of Fedora, I wanted to replace it. Just because I wanted easy way to get all mobile phones connected to network.

Good sources

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend using the site:
http://tuxmobile.org/

They got good ressources regarding tablet pc.

For hadwriting recognition, the only non-commercial software I know is "Cellwriter". I also use "gournal" to take notes. If you use a fujitsu tablet pc, "fscd" will allow you to use the tablet mode by automaticaly rotating the screen.

I have fujitsu lifebook T4010, running both debian and ubuntu. I had to do some tweaking with both systems to get everything running fine. Both system run smoothly, but I recommend avoiding "heavy" desktop manager for a lighter one such as Xfce or Openbox.

ooo alternatives

[bugi]

Two of which are gnumeric and abiword. They don't have quite all the features as their behemoth cousins, but that's usually a good thing.

Also, not so great for tablets, but for battery life where you have a keyboard, sc and oleo are text-mode spreadsheets.

OpenSuSE 11.0 with XFCE

[Lord Byron II]

The XFCE is the important part - any distribution that offers it should be roughly equivalent in power usage and speed. I use it on a P4-1.4GHz with 768MB of RAM and it boots almost exactly TWICE as fast as my friend's six-month old Vista desktop. I'm not sure what processor/ram combo he has, but a six-month old desktop from Lenovo should be able to easily beat my ancient computer.

Three things I like about this configuration:

1-It uses next to nothing in resources.
2-It's easy to setup. For example, I haven't looked at shutting down unnecessary services, etc. I could probably get a pretty good speed boost if I did.
3-XFCE's user interface is similar enough to KDE/Windows that I don't notice the difference. Some window managers behave so differently, it is very jarring to try and use them.

Damn Small Linux

[sydbarrett74]

Damn Small Linux

on my asus EEE 900

[JeanBaptiste]

I like XP on it. Runs just fine. Runs world of warcraft too.

Re:on my asus EEE 900

[brianez21]

I actually have an Asus EEE 701. For a long while I was running Ubuntu 8.04 "netbook remix" on it, but I decided that I'd like a change of pace. I found a heavily nLite'd edition of Windows called "TinyXP" and installed that - it is very snappy even on the 600Mhz Celeron!

Powertop's great but

[Sits]

There's more to powersaving than just reducing wakeups. On one thinkpad I tried it on wakeups were less than 15 per second but power usage was more than that of Windows. Being able to fully turn off devices and spin down disks will often save more than powertop will (however if you can do all these other things the having a low number of wakeups with a tickless kernel will let you achieve low power usage levels other OSes may struggle to reach). There is a nice paper about the topic of power saving by the renown Linux hacker Matthew Garrett talking about powersaving where much of this is discussed.

T22 PCLINUXOS minime 2008

[cenc]

PIII 900mhz, 512 megs of sdram, 30 gig hard drive. It is the primary computer I use for watching movies in my bedroom hooked up to a good monitor, running kde.

I could load it up with something much smaller, but it runs PCLINUXOS perfectly, so why bother trimming the fat.

emacs

[jc42]

Huh? What?

It isn't???

I highly recommend BackTrack 3.

[Phizzle]

BackTrack 3 is awesome, light on resources, installs with lower requirements than Ubunty 8.04, no driver headaches. GET SOME http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack_download.html ! Overview and history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackTrack . Enjoy!

Re:I highly recommend BackTrack 3.

[Creepy Crawler]

Uh huh. Like I'd trust a bunch of exploiters to play nice with a system. What's its main feature? Extracting the SAM db on your windows machine and mailing it to remote-exploit.com? I'd bet a dollar that there's a trojan or 2 there for the unsuspecting users.

Even though, it is their right to do so, they choose to advertise in that system. The claim is that only bookmarks are being advertised... Hardly doubt that.

Contiki

[Anonymous Coward]

it'll run on a commodore64, supposedly
http://www.sics.se/contiki/
also has ipv6 support

Put Xubuntu on it

[jvin248]

I run a 500Mhz Pentium III with Xubuntu 8.04.1 on it and use Open Office for presentations with clients.

So anything faster than that and you're in good shape - or look for something with fluxbox on it. If you want a really slim system, look for "damn small linux"

Currently using ubuntu on hp tc1100

[denominateur]

I have just acquired a hp tc1100 tablet and am happily using ubuntu on it. It does require a fair bit of configuration though.

1) ubuntu now comes with xorg auto configuration, you need to undo that and write a custom xorg.conf to include tablet support (plenty of guides out there)

2) you need to modify /etc/gdm/Init/Default to launch an on screen keyboard (OSK) so you can log in and /etc/gdm/PreLogin/Default to kill the OSK after logging in if you want to use another one for normal text entry. Also, you need to turn off the fancy login screen and use the plain one

3) get cellwriter and train it, it's good and comes with an integrated OSK

4) configure your drivers to support RandR and use the script here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Wacom_Serial_Tablet_PC_Stylus to enable rotation between portrait and landscape mode

5) if you are using intrepid and have nvidia hardware, nvidia binary blob drivers will not work yet (nvidia has not updated for new xorg yet)

6) xournal is easily comparable to windows journal but requires a bit of fiddling to get the preferences just right. Also, it has drawing problems if you set your zoom level to anything BELOW fit to width

7) I use opera for browsing as the sidepane menu is so versatile. Also, it supports drag scrolling by setting the about:config options "scroll is drag"

8) evince unfortunately only supports drag scrolling using the middle mouse button and does not offer any way of configuring that. (bugs have been submitted though)

toned down Arch Linux

[BitwizeGHC]

Arch Linux with a stripped down desktop (i.e., no KDE, no GNOME, something light and simple like fvwm or fluxbox) fills my needs wonderfully.

But that's me.

Ubuntu with Opera or DSL

[cowtamer]

I run Ubuntu on a similar laptop, and the performance was HORRIBLE until I decided to ditch Firefox and go with Opera as the browser (such a laptop is generally just useful for browsing anyway, in my experience). Turn Flash and GIF animation off, and you're good to go...

Your other alternative is DSL for its low memory footprint.

Re:Ubuntu with Opera or DSL

[cliffyqs]

I have an IBM 380XD, PII 266 MHz, 5GB hd, 96 MB RAM. I'll let that soak in a bit... I had FreeBSD on one drive, now swapped drives and running Xubuntu. It's pretty happy if I use Fluxbox or Xmonad for window manager, usable for PDFs, documents (abiword), web browsing, other light duty stuff. FreeBSD is a little faster but I find Xubuntu easier to manage. p.s. Xubuntu = xfce + Ubuntu.

OpenSolaris: The OS of the future

[GrimLordJesus]

OpenSolaris is a good choice I believe. It can be downloaded for free from http://opensolaris.org/os/ or you can request a free copy to be shipped to your door. Use CDE for desktop environment and you're laptop will be rekindled!

little focus on battery life.

[itzdandy]

Reguardless of the posts that say they get better battery life on linux, there is an overwhelming amount of information on generally poor battery life on linux.

To clarify, I dont think this is some sort of technical weakness but rather a lack of focus on laptops by many linux developers. This is quickly changing also.

One of the big things is that video drivers for linux are not as mature and often lack power saving options or have power saving options that are inferior to the windows driver, again from lack of focus.

I currently have a dell E1505 and a thinkpad t61. The dell has an ATI x1400 and that is the main issue for battery life. It does have some power management options but they are poorly implemented in the linux drivers(both binary and open source). The thinkpad on the other hand has an intel video chip and is very close in battery life to windows AFTER I tweaked a bunch of things like swappiness to avoid hitting the hard drive for cache a lot and a number of other things.

Tyop

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be...
'apt-get install fscd fsc-btns-modules-`uname -r`'
not
'apt-get install fscd fsc-btns-modules-`uname -r'
Sorry about that.

By the way, before fooling around with setserial, look up your model online--it may already have the tablet hooked up to COM1, and you can just skip that step.

Having a similar computer myself,

[Anonymous Coward]

The WM is the key. I use Fluxbox, and thus Fluxbuntu, but you may want something even lighter like the DSL/Puppy/etc distros meant to run on toasters. If there's a problem with using Ubuntu repos, it's that XMMS and its "old, runs on crappy computers" ilk have been removed, which just meants extra work to track down and set up.

For reference, I'm dealing with the P2110 and ~500 MHz, 240 MB of RAM. Thunar as file manager, Opera 9.5 as browser (sorry FF3, you're too slow)...

NetBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been running NetBSD 4.0.1 on my EEE PC 900 for a few weeks now. While it does not have the out-of-the-box bells and whistles that come with most Linux distributions or windows, it is very lightweight (my base memory usage running the GENERIC_LAPTOP kernel, X, OpenMotif, and CMUCL is just 70 MB). I/O is a bit slow, but I suspect that I can iron that out with some tuning.

Most of the software that a nerd would need is available in the pkgsrc tree. I for one just use it for programming and InfoSec work, and it works just fine for me.

There are some gaps, though, namely a lack of "point and click" power management and wifi administration tools. Once you find and learn the commands, however, its not so bad.

Caveats:
You will need to use the "atheee.patch" patch in order to get the system to see the wifi interface.

I have not yet got the X server to run in 1024x600 mode, it runs in 800x600. I spend most of my time in console mode, though, and have not really had any driving need to sit down and get X running properly. I suspect that it won't be too difficult.

The EEE PC 900 seems to compile things slower than its CPU clock would suggest. Building kernels can take about 10 minutes and GHC took the better part of an evening to compile and bootstrap. I suspect that this is due to slow I/O to and from the disk.

Re:NetBSD

[LordActon]

my base memory usage running the GENERIC_LAPTOP kernel, X, OpenMotif, and CMUCL is just 70 MB

Yep, and I'll bet you can reduce that substantially, and speed up boot times, but removing devices from the kernel and recompiling.

I/O is a bit slow

look into soft-deps.

Fast Linux Desktop: LXDE

[Anonymous Coward]

On my netbook I use LXDE (on top of Ubuntu Linux 8.10) because it is the fastest desktop environment out there while features and look and feel are comparable to GNOME and Windows. Check out: http://lxde.org.

just say no to puppy...

[pointbeing]

Puppy linux. Running it right now on my eeepc 2g surf--800 Celeron with 512 MB. Works great!

I like Puppy, honest - but I don't like Puppy's security model.

I get that Puppy's supposed to be a reasonably fast single-user system but there are distributions out there that are just as fast with a better software channel - such as Xbuntu, Vector Linux or damn near anything else that's got Enlightenment or xfce available as a window manager - and those distributions don't require you to run as root.

Something really small.......

[soundproofing.noise]

like the single floppy embedded linux? http://freshmeat.net/projects/natld/

It's a niche system

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you NOT tweak it to fit?

WinCE and MobilePC is necessarily tweaked to hell and back. Has to be.

Why then would you not use the open source nature of FOSS to tweak it for your needs?

Only reason I can see is to hobble "the competition".

Vista Report

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Samsung Q1U running the supplied OS (Vista Home Premium). 800MHz Axx CPU and 1GB of DDR2. The 1st thing I did was upgrade to a 2GB SODIMM to reduce the disk thrashing (there is no excuse when the PC is ~$1000 and the ram upgrade is ~$20). I then turned down lots of Vista graphics and indexing options. It is quite responsive now but resuming from standby, hibernation or a cold boot you do need to give it 2-5 minutes to "settle down". Running without antivirus gives a large speed boost but I am not prepared to do that on a daily basis. I am guessing that a SLC solid state drive would make a big difference but finding an affordable 1.8" one is not an option yet.

The main issue is the PC can't support high bandwidth over the wireless network interface and a CPU intensive task at the same time. So video calls with Skype are out of the question as is streaming of movies with Windows Media player.

Much more successfully was using GOM and also Chrome as my default movie player and browser.

I am interested in any links people have to software that can fine tune vista's settings for performance (nlite but are there others?). I have resisted changing OS (XP or Linux) as I do like Vista's handwriting recognition.

Aros!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.aros.org

Outdated?

[Abattoir]

I heard PalmOS works pretty well on outdated portable devices. Maybe you can hack it to run on that netbook?

Extra Information on FLP

[malevolentjelly]

Is that's what's being packaged with the Dell Mini? I saw one with XP in a computer store on a college campus and I literally said "what" when I saw it.

I am not sure if something FLP based is what's being used for their special "netbook" version of XP. I would imagine it's pretty similar, though. FLP is very architecturally similar to WEPOS - Windows Embedded for Point of Sale systems. In fact, it shares a Service Pack 3 with WEPOS. You've probably seen it running on high end cash registers. It's essentially a Thin Client system that's designed to get a minimal but secure OS running on lower end hardware- where one might use Windows 2000 or 98, you use something XP based instead to get extra security and modern wifi support.

The other benefit is that it has a very IT-oriented installer that allows you to deselect anything, even Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer-- it can be from 530 mb to ~1100 mb. However, DO NOT deselect IE unless you are experienced with software deployment and DO NOT deselect Windows Media Player or else you won't have Direct X! The installation system is actually a Windows PE-based XP installer that uses Windows Image files. Pretty neat, huh?

The hardware requirements of regular XP are about RAM: 128(256)mb and CPU: 500(700)mhz I believe-- in FLP it's RAM: 64(96)mb and CPU:200(350)mhz.

The one caveat listed is that it's supposedly not fully compatible with XP software and drivers. I haven't found anything like that yet, though. Seriously- I've got a full blown desktop PC running on it that was able to run Half Life 2 and Prey, etc. as well as all your standard Windows software. It does not have mspaint, though you can copy it from XP.. nor does it have a joystick panel, same story. Third party apps and drivers will recognize it at XP SP2 (or 3 if updated) but Microsoft stuff will know it's not XP. Plan accordingly! Also, you won't have MS Outlook, but if you need a nice substitute, I recommend the Windows Live Mail client, which is basically outlook+ with automatic Live and Gmail handling integrated.

Hope this clears some stuff up. :)

Can I hear some love for Zenwalk Linux?

[MilesAttacca]

I have a 10-year-old ThinkPad 600E (500MHz PIII, 320MB PC-100, 8GB HDD) that I run the latest version of Zenwalk on. The OS is lightweight, highly responsive, simple but easy to navigate, and doesn't bloat itself with multiple applications per function. The laptop has a bit of a problem with web browsing, but that's only because of Flash; Opera does a fine job even on JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook. Highly recommended...even if the latest version of the xnetpkg package manager does really suck.

a slim osx86project.org Don't flame me!

[Eganicus]

Exclude extra languages, DVD & movie making software... Handwriting support "Inkwell" has been around for a while.... you may even find Newton apps ported.... ( I'm going to be flamed so bad... )

re

[Anonymous Coward]

i actually followed a similar route but went with the lower end p1120. ive installed slackware 12.1 on it and everything pretty much works out the box. after trimming some fat off the generic kernel, dropping any unneeded services and giving up my beloved xfce for fluxbox, it boots up fairly quick and feels much more responsive than i had expected considering it's specs.

i'd say any distro that will allow you to easily cut out the bloat and isnt tied to a resource hungry DE will do the trick.

What's that for a question again ?

[yvesdandoy]

who post these kind of things ???
PLease stop him !!!

QNX?

[aqk]

How about QNX?

Somehow, this operating system never became popular on the desktop, although we did try it out back in the days of DOS and XENIX...
.
Check out its entry on Wikipedia

Sophos

[Anonymous Coward]

Sophos itself isn't free but if you work for a company and they use the enterprise version you can get free (legal) licenses for home use :)

It's my preferred anti virus software.

MUST RESIST!... No, I can't do it

[badkarmadayaccount]

s/Windows ME/Plan 9/g

:wq

*ducks*

Its not the OS that is the issue

[nurb432]

Its the stuff you want to run on top of it.

Not that it answers the question directly, but it does make it more accurate.